THE CHEERY WOMAN
Every one loves Mrs. Merrysmile, she is so bright and cheery and lovable, in a holiday way. To be with her is as good as going to the seaside, her breezy talk being as so much ozone. Yes, she is very popular; a kind of female Brighton, that one goes to for the purpose of being mentally braced up with general cheeriness and gaiety and excitement. Other women are our Cromers and our Birchingtons, whither we go for soothing rest and idle dreaming and world-forgetting but Mrs. Merrysmile is our London-by-the-Sea. We dress ourselves in our best to please her, and she keeps us on the alert. If we be dull and out of sorts, she takes it as a personal reproach, for she is so cheery herself that she cannot understand any ailment or misfortune being sufficiently depressing to counteract her influence. In her eyes dulness is an unpardonable offence, while to be invalided is to incur her serious displeasure; if you chance to be either, Mrs. Merrysmile attributes it merely to temper. She will tell you with a charmingly frank affectation that she hates the afflicted, and that the positively poor revolt her; but she professes to entertain the greatest sympathy with enterprising criminals, while the audaciously unscrupulous bankrupt is actually a hero in her eyes—a contrariness which must not be regarded as due to any flaw in her moral attitude, for that is quite above reproach, but simply to that effervescent cheeriness which will not accept defeat in any form. She cannot understand any one being beaten by circumstances, for, as she rather illogically puts it, “Circumstances were made for slaves; I make my own.” She says a great many things like this, by the way, and convinces herself, at all events, even if others fail to quite catch her meaning.
She is a masterful little woman, and among her own relations and immediate friends she is a perfect autocrat. Her constant cheeriness commands everything, and preserves a family unity, for in every emergency, in any dispute, in any trouble, Mrs. Merrysmile is the centre towards which they all make, from which radiates all the harmony. How many a family quarrel has been averted by her happily apposite wit, how many a cloud has she laughed away with the sunshine of her cheerful little heart! For though she pretends that humour rather than affection is the key-note of her life, that she would sacrifice any tender sentiment for the sake of a joke, Mrs. Merrysmile is brimming over with love of kith and kind, and is peculiarly sensitive to that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. Her never-failing cheeriness enables her to find some subject of interest everywhere, and the most commonplace stranger has some point that will appeal to her. Her universal sympathy is, in fact, quite remarkable. She can talk with equal interest to the washerwoman with seventeen children, a drunken husband and the rheumatics, and to the lady-novelist with a few published books and an inordinate idea of their merits and her own fame. She will enter into discussion upon any subject of interest to the person with whom she may chance to be conversing, irrespective of possibly her complete ignorance of it, yet somehow she will leave an impression that she is quite conversant with the matter. Her cheery manner and happy knack of saying the right thing at the right moment would, I believe, carry her triumphantly through a debate at the Royal Society, while I am convinced that if she had a seat in Parliament, the members below the gangway would accept her as their leader. They would not elect her; she would simply assume the position as a matter of course, and there would be an end of the matter, of course. Some women are born to lead as some men are, and whatever the circumstances of their lives, they will lead those around them. Mrs. Merrysmile is decidedly one of these women, but she leads by her perpetual, irrepressible cheeriness. There is no gainsaying it, it carries you along like a flood.
When I first met Mrs. Merrysmile I was in a hopeless state of depression. I had been disappointed by a woman I loved, and was very miserable, though I have no doubt I thoroughly deserved my fate. The fact is, when I was in love I was so heart-whole about the matter, it became so absolutely the only part of my life with which I had any concern, that I am now quite convinced I must have been a nuisance to the object of my adoration. For women do not love like this; they do not care to be perpetually in the society of their lover, they want change and the liberty of the subject. But, to a man who has no confidence in himself, that liberty of the subject, in the case of the woman he loves, always suggests possibilities of being superseded by some more engaging lover. Women are not as constant as men. I say this in no reproachful spirit, it is simply that their keener sensibility renders them more liable to receive fresh impressions, and to feel the influences of new personalities. Therefore, to a self-suspecting lover as I have always been, doubting my own powers to engage a woman’s constancy, jealousy, with all its petty irritations and its trivial tyrannies, was bound to come between her and myself. It needs a very strong and deep love to accept jealousy as an every-day accompaniment, and I do not suppose I was able to inspire that. So my love-dreams were roughly interrupted, and I was left to get over my sorrow and disappointment as best I could. Happily for me, Mrs. Merrysmile chanced upon my life at this opportune time. What I should have done without her I scarcely dare to think. Anyhow, some years have passed since then, and life has still its possibilities.
I remember, at our first meeting, in answer to some remark of hers, I said, “Nothing matters,” and she reproved me with, “Everything matters.” From that moment her cheeriness began to exert its influence upon my life, for she had immediately divined that something was wrong with me, and she determined to set it right. With a woman’s instinct she guessed it was love. A man would have put it down to liver; but a woman is sure that love is at the root of all evil. So Mrs. Merrysmile began to work in her own cheery, womanly way, and I, little suspecting her methods, lent myself to them entirely. She would draw me out every day on the subject of my love, and I, believing her to be wholly sympathetic, would tell her all that was in my heart, and she would say that she liked me to talk of that other woman. And I would do so, until, without noticing it, I talked less of her, and found that I was drifting into an interest for Mrs. Merrysmile herself, irrespective of her sympathy in my love-affair. Then this became accentuated by her persistent high spirits and jocularity, for though our surroundings of sea and cliff and cornfields, with the infinite poetry of ever-changing skies and moonlit nights, with their majestic mysteries, held me ever in the sentimental mood, and I believed her to be in tune with me, I would frequently receive a shock of discord from her sudden and unconscious leap from the sentimental to the grotesque, from the sublime to the ridiculous. She would rudely break an exquisite silence, which to me had meant a meeting of souls, a mute embrace of thoughts, with some irrelevant remark, some inconsequent gossip, which would jar upon me terribly, but which would really bring me nearer to her, for I would obstinately refuse to believe I had mistaken her soulfulness and beautiful womanliness, notwithstanding those jarring inconsistencies, which I could only regard as the excrescences of her natural cheeriness.
So I grew to love her in spite of myself, and then I began to realise that Mrs. Merrysmile was really an agreeable little flirt who had only taken any trouble to cultivate my affection—which she certainly did very artistically—because I was so absorbed in the woman who had naturally grown tired of me. This, to Mrs. Merrysmile, seemed not only a great pity for myself, but a slight to her own vanity, a waste of sound affection, and to remedy it presented an interesting experiment for a few idle weeks’ occupation. Those silences which I thought so beautifully mutual in feeling, as we sat and gazed over the blue deep, and into those wonderful summer skies which seemed to contain a world’s epic in their spacious mysteries, were, after all, most humorous interludes to her, full of amusing conjecture; but she could no more help all this than she could help talking.
Life is a constant carnival to Mrs. Merrysmile, and love is a delightful pastime which is necessary for her entertainment. There is no harm in it; her love-making is, indeed, of the most innocent kind, in fact, it is purely psychological, without a suspicion of passion, which would only seem incongruous to her. To be loved is essential to her; every one who comes in contact with her must give her of his heart’s best affection. She is satisfied with nothing else, and though she and her husband are on terms of mutual affection and perfect confidence, she takes all the love she can get as her absolute right. That she should give any in return never occurs to her; it is sufficient that she scatters her cheeriness broadcast, relieves her friends and relations of all their depressions, keeps them in good spirits, and, if they be dull or ill, bullies them with a view to mending their ways. But she loves, in her own way, as the butterfly loves the flower that it casually kisses in the garden, and surely the flower is all the sweeter for the butterfly’s kiss. I know I feel all the better for having touched hearts with Mrs. Merrysmile, though her way of loving was not my way, and my sentimental devotion was as congruous with her butterfly heart-flutterings as the Nasmyth steam-hammer with the tin-tack.
The humour of the situation was always uppermost in her mind though it had to compete for this place with the gratification of her vanity and the pleasure of passing the time cheerfully for us both, and she could not understand that the whole affair did not present itself to me in exactly the same light. As immunity from contradiction of any kind had been hers throughout her life, both as maid and as wife, my frequent failure to fall in with her ideas as to the humour of our flirtation—for to her it was really nothing more, though in her innocent way she pretended to regard it as a real love-affair—it was not to be wondered at that our confidential communings became less constant, until my lover-like attitude developed into that of the elderly friend. You cannot go on loving desperately a woman to whom everything is simply funny, or, at least, suggestion for a jest. And that is one of the drawbacks of a par excellence cheery woman. You want to love the woman rather than her jokes, or even her bright spirits, charming as the faculty for these undoubtedly is. But as a man’s moods vary so does he expect the woman he loves to respond to them. Incessant cheeriness and readiness to see only the quaint or comic side of things, if unchecked in expression, is apt to turn life into a farce, and even the merriest farce jars when one is only in the temper for romantic drama, or when pathos is the dominant note of the moment.
Yet with all her irresponsibility of feeling, with all her irrelevance of mood, Mrs. Merrysmile is quite one of the most delightful companions for man or woman. She is a woman’s woman quite as much as a man’s, but I would specially recommend her at times of joy and frolic rather than of sorrow—however excellent her intention to cheer you and help you make the best of everything. For so casual is her nature that troubles will scarcely present their actual aspect to her in relation to all the surrounding facts of life; she will think they are not really as heavy and important as you think them, but rather chide you for making such a fuss. It is from no lack of sympathy that this charming little woman will not always understand your feelings, but simply that her native cheerfulness is so superabundant; she cannot realise that things can ever be as bad as less optimistic persons imagine. And if, when you feel ill, she tells you bluntly that there is little or nothing the matter with you, it is only because she believes too much sympathy is not conducive to effort towards recovery, and she hates to see people ill. It is perhaps very irritating, but it is her way, and it is quite good-natured.
I should hardly recommend Mrs. Merrysmile as a consoler in a house of mourning; the very brightness of her disposition might clash with the grief of the bereaved ones, and an obstinate contrariness of spirit, coupled with a desire to make everybody as cheerful as herself, might, perhaps, give pain where she intended comfort. Nor would Mrs. Merrysmile be a suitable wife for a man of melancholy mood or morose temper, for she would jar upon him with her intemperate cheerfulness and unmuzzled mirth, while he would bore her unutterably. But she is just happily placed as she is, with a husband ready to worship the ground she walks upon, with a host of friends and relations that defer to her autocratic word with infinite pleasure, and a friend, who is glad to have loved her, but is just as content, and after all, perhaps happier, to have won her friendship through the more subtle and intimate insight into her nature gained as a lover. She is a delightful little creature, but she should always live in the sunshine and amid the roses. There she is perfectly appropriate, and life is the richer and the fairer for her presence.