it seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable and ungrateful of her to become a tearful young woman after their union, and for a phase of some months she certainly was a tearful young woman, but his mother made it clear to him that this was quite a correct and permissible phase for her, as she was, and so he expressed his impatience with temperance, and presently she was able to pull herself together and begin to readjust herself to a universe that had seemed for a time almost too shattered for endurance. she resumed the process of growing up that her marriage had for a time so vividly interrupted, and if her schooldays were truncated and the college phase omitted, she had at any rate a very considerable amount of fundamental experience to replace these now customary completions.
three little girls she brought into the world in the first three years of her married life, then after a brief interval of indifferent health she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to its predecessors, and then, after—and perhaps as a consequence of—much whispered conversation of the two mothers-in-law, protests and tactful explanation on the part of the elderly and trustworthy family doctor and remarks of an extraordinary breadth (and made at table too, almost before the door had closed on snagsby!) from ellen's elder sister, there came a less reproductive phase....
but by that time lady harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. the one thing trains for the other.
now the chief circumstance in the life of lady harman was sir isaac. indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation. there wasn't a direction in which she could turn without immediately running up against him. he had taken possession of her extremely. and from her first resignation to this as an inevitable fact she had come, she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to regard this large and various universe beyond him and outside of him, with something of the same slight adventurousness she had felt before he so comprehensively happened to her. after her first phase of despair she had really done her best to honour the bargain she had rather unwittingly made and to love and to devote herself and be a loyal and happy wife to this clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence that made her realize the impossibility of such a concentration.
his was a supremely acquisitive and possessive character, so that he insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive suspicion and jealousy, he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father, jealous of her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet wordsworth because she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she loved great music, jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam of any warmth of temperament filled him with a vile and furious dread of dishonouring possibilities. and the utmost resolution to believe in him could not hide from her for ever the fact that his love manifested itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership and a desire, without kindliness, without any self-forgetfulness. all his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of eager courtship. do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling between the clenched teeth. he would not let her forget a single detail. whenever she tried to look at any created thing, he thrust himself, like one of his own open-air advertisements, athwart the attraction.
as she grew up to an achieved womanhood—and it was even a physical growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature after her marriage—her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this side of him and that, while with a toiling industry he fought to intercept it. and from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial submission, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely lonely and unsupported, to exist—against him.
in every novel as in every picture there must be an immense simplification, and so i tell the story of lady harman's changing attitude without any of those tangled leapings-forward or harkings-back, those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up the necessary course of her mind. but sometimes she was here and sometimes she was there, sometimes quite back to the beginning an obedient, scrupulously loyal and up-looking young wife, sometimes a wife concealing the humiliation of an unhappy choice in a spurious satisfaction and affection. and mixed up with widening spaces of criticism and dissatisfaction and hostility there were, you must understand, moments of real liking for this outrageous little man and streaks of an absurd maternal tenderness for him. they had been too close together to avoid that. she had a woman's affection of ownership too, and disliked to see him despised or bettered or untidy; even those ridiculous muddy hands had given her a twinge of solicitude....
and all the while she was trying to see the universe also, the great background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean for her over and above their too obliterating relationship.
6
it would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how ideas of insubordination came drifting into sir isaac's paradise. the epidemic is in the air. there is no tempter nowadays, no definitive apple. the disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a draught, creeps and gathers like the dust,—a disseminated serpent. sir isaac brought home his young, beautiful and rather crumpled and astonished eve and by all his standards he was entitled to be happy ever afterwards. he knew of one danger, but against that he was very watchful. never once for six long years did she have a private duologue with another male. but mudie and sir jesse boot sent parcels to the house unchecked, the newspaper drifted in not even censored: the nurses who guided ellen through the essential incidents of a feminine career talked of something called a "movement." and there was georgina....
the thing they wanted they called the vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. it wanted,—it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want. that remarkable agitation had already worked up to the thunderous pitch, there had been demonstrations at public meetings, scenes in the ladies' gallery and something like rioting in parliament square before ever it occurred to sir isaac that this was a disturbance that touched his home. he had supposed suffragettes were ladies of all too certain an age with red noses and spectacles and a masculine style of costume, who wished to be hugged by policemen. he said as much rather knowingly and wickedly to charterson. he could not understand any woman not coveting the privileges of lady harman. and then one day while georgina and her mother were visiting them, as he was looking over the letters at the breakfast table according to his custom before giving them out, he discovered two identical newspaper packets addressed to his wife and his sister-in-law, and upon them were these words printed very plainly, "votes for women."
"good lord!" he cried. "what's this? it oughtn't to be allowed." and he pitched the papers at the wastepaper basket under the sideboard.
"i'll thank you," said georgina, "not to throw away our votes for women. we subscribe to that."
"eh?" cried sir isaac.
"we're subscribers. snagsby, just give us those papers." (a difficult moment for snagsby.) he picked up the papers and looked at sir isaac.
"put 'em down there," said sir isaac, waving to the sideboard and then in an ensuing silence handed two letters of no importance to his mother-in-law. his face was pale and he was breathless. snagsby with an obvious tactfulness retired.
sir isaac watched the door close.
his remark pointedly ignored georgina.
"what you been thinking about, elly," he asked, "subscribing to that thing?"
"i wanted to read it."
"but you don't hold with all that rubbish——"
"rubbish!" said georgina, helping herself to marmalade.
"well, rot then, if you like," said sir isaac, unamiably and panting.
with that as snagsby afterwards put it—for the battle raged so fiercely as to go on even when he presently returned to the room—"the fat was in the fire." the harman breakfast-table was caught up into the great controversy with heat and fury like a tree that is overtaken by a forest fire. it burnt for weeks, and smouldered still when the first white heats had abated. i will not record the arguments of either side, they were abominably bad and you have heard them all time after time; i do not think that whatever side you have taken in this matter you would find much to please you in sir isaac's goadings or georgina's repartees. sir isaac would ask if women were prepared to go as soldiers and georgina would enquire how many years of service he had done or horrify her mother by manifest allusion to the agonies and dangers of maternity,—things like that. it gave a new interest to breakfast for snagsby; and the peculiarly lady-like qualities of mrs. sawbridge, a gift for silent, pallid stiffness, a disposition, tactful but unsuccessful, to "change the subject," an air of being about to leave the room in disdain, had never shone with such baleful splendour. our interest here is rather with the effect of these remarkable disputes, which echoed in sir isaac's private talk long after georgina had gone again, upon lady harman. he could not leave this topic of feminine emancipation alone, once it had been set going, and though ellen would always preface her remarks by, "of course georgina goes too far," he worried her slowly into a series of definite insurgent positions. sir isaac's attacks on georgina certainly brought out a good deal of absurdity in her positions, and georgina at times left sir isaac without a leg to stand on, and the net result of their disputes as of most human controversies was not conviction for the hearer but release. her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood. that question originally put in paradise, "why shouldn't we?" came into her mind and stayed there. it is a question that marks a definite stage in the departure from innocence. things that had seemed opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. she began to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and less and less to pass the time. ideas came to her that seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. and a disturbing intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased in her.
you will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in lady harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. you see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. all children, i suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. they go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. but for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. the warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision. that burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. the talent has been given us and we may not bury it.
