_ THIRD PART. MY HONEYMOON
FORTY-FIRST CHAPTER
But next morning, having had time to think things out in my simple and ignorant way, I tried to reconcile myself to my position. Remembering what Aunt Bridget had said, both before my marriage and after it, about the different moralities of men and women, I told myself I had placed my standard too high.
Perhaps a husband was not a superior being, to be regarded with respect and reverence, but a sort of grown-up child whom it was the duty of a wife to comfort, coax, submit to and serve.
I determined to do this. Still clinging to the hope of falling in love with my husband, I set myself to please him by every means within my power, even to the length of simulating sentiments which I did not feel.
But what a task I was setting myself! What a steep and stony Calvary I was attempting to climb!
After the degrading business with the other woman had been concluded I thought we should have left England immediately on the honeymoon tour which my husband had mapped out for us, but he told me that would not be convenient and we must remain in London a little longer. We stayed six weeks altogether, and never did a young wife pass a more cheerless and weary time.
I had no friends of my own within reach, and to my deep if secret mortification no woman of my husband's circle called upon me. But a few of his male friends were constantly with us, including Mr. Eastcliff, who had speedily followed us from Ellan, and a Mr. Vivian, who, though the brother of a Cabinet Minister, seemed to me a very vain and vapid person, with the eyes of a mole, a vacant smile, a stupid expression, an abrupt way of speaking through his teeth, and a shrill voice which gave the impression of screeching against the wind.
With these two men, and others of a similar kind, we passed many hours of nearly every day, lunching with them, dining with them, walking with them, driving with them, and above all playing bridge with them in one of our sitting rooms in the hotel.
I knew nothing of the game to begin with, never having touched a card in my life, but in accordance with the theories which I believed to be right and the duties I had imposed upon myself, I took a hand with my husband when he could find nobody better to be his partner.
The results were very disheartening. In spite of my desire to please I was slow to learn, and my husband's impatience with my mistakes, which confused and intimidated me, led to some painful humiliations. First he laughed, next he sneered, then he snapped me up in the midst of my explanations and apologies, and finally, at a moment of loss, he broke out on me with brutal derision, saying he had never had much opinion of my intellect, but was now quite sure that I had no more brains than a rabbit and could not say Boo to a goose.
One day when we were alone, and he was lying on the couch with his vicious little terrier by his side, I offered to sing to him. Remembering how my voice had been praised, I thought it would be pleasant to my husband to see that there was something I really could do. But nine years in a convent had left me with next to no music but memories of the long-breathed harmonies of some of the beautiful masses of our Church, and hardly had I begun on these when my husband cried:
"Oh, stop, stop, for heaven's sake stop, or I shall think we're attending a funeral."
Another day I offered to read to him. The Reverend Mother used to say I was the best reader she had ever heard, but perhaps it was not altogether my husband's fault if he formed a different opinion. And indeed I cannot but think that the holy saints themselves would have laughed if they had heard me reading aloud, in the voice and intonation which I had assumed for the meditations of St. Francis of Assisi, the mystic allusions to "certs," and "bookies," and "punters," and "evens," and "scratchings," which formed the substance of the sporting journals that were my husband's only literature.
"Oh, stop it, stop it," he cried again. "You read the 'Winning Post' as if it were the Book of Revelation."
As time passed the gulf that separated me from my husband became still greater. If I could have entertained him with any kind of gossip we might have got on better. But I had no conversation that interested him, and he had little or none that I could pretend to understand. He loved the town; I loved the country; he loved the night and the blaze of electric lights; I loved the morning and the sweetness of the sun.
At the bottom of my heart I knew that his mind was common, low and narrow, and that his tastes were gross and vulgar, but I was determined to conquer the repulsion I felt for him.
It was impossible. If I could have struck one spark from the flint of his heart the relations between us might have been different. If his look could have met my look in a single glance of understanding I could have borne with his impatience and struggled on.
But nothing of this kind ever happened, and when one dreary night after grumbling at the servants, cursing his fate and abusing everybody and everything, he put on his hat and went out saying he had "better have married Lena [the other woman] after all," for in that case he would have had "some sort of society anyway," the revulsion I had felt on the night of my marriage came sweeping over me like a wave of the sea, and I asked myself again, "What's the good? What's the good?" _