Part 3

'No, it isn't your fault, you dear little donkey; it is only the natural sequence of things. Men are always like that when the woman loves them; when she don't, they behave much better. My dear, this is just what is so annoying about love; the man's is always going slower and slower towards a dead stop, as the woman's is "coaling" and getting steam up. I borrow Papa's admirably accurate metaphor, nothing can be truer. It is a great pity, but I suppose the fault is Nature's. _Entre nous_, I don't think Nature ever contemplated marriage, any more than she did crinolettes, pearl powder, or the electric light. There is no doubt that Nature intended to adjust the thing on the butterfly and buttercup system; on the _je reste, tu t'en vas_, principle. And nothing would be easier or nicer, only there are children and poverty. So the butterfly has to be pinned down by the buttercup. That is why the Communists and Anarchists always abolish Property and Marriage together. The one is evolved out of the other, just as the dear scientists say the horse was evolved out of a bird, which I never can see makes the matter any easier of comprehension; but, still--what was I saying? Oh, I meant to say this: you are only lamenting, as a special defalcation and disloyalty in San Zenone, what is merely his unconscious and involuntary and perfectly natural alteration from a lover into a husband. The butterfly is beginning to feel the pin, which has been run through him to stick him down. It is not your fault, my sweet little girl; it is the fault, if at all, of the world, which has decreed that the butterfly, to flirt legitimately with the buttercup, must suffer the corking pin. Now, take my advice: the pin is in, don't worry if he writhe on it a little bit! It is only what the beloved scientists again call automatic action. And do try and beat into your little head the fact that a man may love you very dearly, and yet yearn a little for the _petits théâtres_ in the silent recesses of his manly breast. Of course, I know this sort of rough awakening from delightful dreams is harder for you than it is for most, because you began at such tremendous altitudes. You had your Ruy Blas and Petrarca, and the mandoline and the moonlight, and the love-philtres, all mixed up in an intoxicating draught. You have naturally a great deal more disillusion to go through than if you had married a country squire, or a Scotch laird, who would never have suggested any romantic delights. One cannot go near Heaven without coming down with a crash, like the poor men in the balloons. You have been up in your balloon, and you are now coming down. Ah, my dear, everything depends on _how_ you come down. You will think me a monster for saying so, but it will rest so much in your own hands. You won't believe it, but it will. If you come down with tact and good-humour, it will all be right afterwards; but if you show temper, as men say of their horses, why, then, the balloon will lie prone, a torn, empty, useless bag, that will never again get off the ground. To speak plainly, dear, if you will receive with resignation and sweetness the unpleasant discovery that San Zenone is mortal, you won't be unhappy, and you will soon get used to it; but if you perpetually fret about it, you won't alter him, and you will both be miserable; or, if not miserable, you will do something worse; you will each find your amusement in somebody else. I know you so well, my poor, pretty Gladys; you want such an immense quantity of sympathy and affection, but you won't get it, my dear child. I quite understand that the Prince looks like a picture, and he has made life an erotic poem for you for a month, and the inevitable reaction which follows seems dull as ditch water, you would even say as cruel as the grave. But it is _nothing new_. Do try and get that well in your mind. Try, too, and be as light-hearted as you can. Men hate an unamusable woman. Make believe to laugh at the French novels, if you can't really do it; if you don't, dear, he will go to somebody else who will. Why do those _demi-monde_ women get such preference over us? Only because they don't bore their men. A man would sooner we flung a champagne glass at his head than cried for five minutes. We can't fling champagne glasses; the prejudices of our education are against it. It is an immense loss to us; we must make up for it as much as we can by being as agreeable as we know how to be. We shall always be a dozen lengths behind those others who _do_ fling the glasses. By the way, you said in one of your earliest notes that you wondered why our mother ever married. I am not sufficiently _au courant_ with pre-historic times to be able to tell you why, but I can see what she has done since she did marry. She has always effaced herself in the very wisest and most prudent manner. She has never begrudged Papa his Norway fishing, or his August yachting, though she knew he could ill afford them. She has never bored him _with_ herself, or _about_ us. She has constantly urged him to go away and enjoy himself, and when he is down with her in the country she always takes care that all the women he admires, and all the men who best amuse him, shall be invited in relays, to prevent his being dull or feeling teased for a moment. I am quite sure she has never cared the least about her own wishes, but has only studied his. This is what I call being a clever woman and a good woman. But I fear such women are as rare as blue roses. Try and be like her, my dear. She was quite as young as you are now when she married. But unfortunately, in truth, you are a terrible little egotist. You want to shut up this beautiful Roman all alone with you in a kind of attitude of perpetual adoration--of yourself. That is what women call affection; you are not alone in your ideas. Some men submit to this sort of demand, and go about for ever held tight in a leash, like unslipped pointers. The majority--well, the majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one of them. I do not think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did. I can see you so exactly, with your pretty, little, grave face, and your eyes that have such a fatal aptitude for tears, and your solemn little views about matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself quite odious to this mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing all the while that you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity by being so remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am afraid so. Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a dull one; the one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_, which is immeasurably worse.'

_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._

"DEAR GWEN,--How can you _possibly_ tell what Mamma did when she was young? I daresay she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got used to it--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to long to be with other people, what is the use of being married at all? I said so to Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point! Si on le savait!_" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's and Richepin's and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them all day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the daytime. He apologises when he is found out, but he yawns as he does so. You say I should amuse him, but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't care for any English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because I cannot talk to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable, and there is always something dreadful happening. There has been such a terrible scene in the village. Four of the Coombe Bysset men, two blacksmiths, a carpenter, and a labourer, have ducked Toniello in the village pond on account of his attention to their womenkind; and Toniello, when he staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his knife on them and stabbed two very badly. Of course, he has been taken up by the constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital. The magistrates are furious and scandalised; and Piero!--Piero has nobody to play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated him about Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into a dreadful passion because one of them said that it was just like a cowardly Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely _hissed_ at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your people," he cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat a man into a jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English mob does? Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four. In my country there is not a night that goes by without a _rissa_ of that sort, but nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to fight it out as best they may; after all, it is the women's fault." And then he said some things that really I cannot repeat, and it was a mercy that, as he spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the old gentleman did not, I think, understand a syllable. But they saw he was in a passion, and that scandalised them, because, you know, English people always think that you should keep your bad temper for your own people at home. Meantime, of course, Toniello is in prison, and I am afraid they won't let us take him out on bail, because he has hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully. Aunt Carrie's solicitors are doing what they can for him, to please me, but I can see they consider it all _peines perdues_ for a rogue who ought to be hanged. "And to think," cries Toniello, "that in my own country I should have all the populace with me. The very carabineers themselves would have been with me! _Accidente a tutti quei grulli_," which means, "may apoplexy seize these fools." "They were only the women's husbands," he adds, with scorn; "they are well worth making a fuss about, certainly!" Then Piero consoles him, and gives him cigarettes, and is obliged to leave him sobbing and tearing his hair, and lying face downward on his bed of sacking. I thought Piero would not leave the poor fellow alone in prison, and so I supposed he would give up all idea of going from here, and so I began to say to myself, "_A quelque chose malheur est bon._" But to-day, at luncheon, Piero said "_Sai carina!_ It was bad enough with Toniello, but without him, I tell you frankly, I cannot stand any more of it. With Toniello one could laugh and forget a little. But now--_anima mia_, if you do not wish me to kill somebody, and be lodged beside Toniello by your worthy law-givers, you must really let me go to Trouville." "Alone!" I said; and I believe it is what he did mean, only the horror in my voice frightened him from confessing it. He sighed and got up. "I suppose I shall never be alone any more," he said impatiently. "If only men knew what they do when they marry--_on ne nous prendrait jamais_. No--no. Of course, I meant that you will, I hope, consent to come away with me somewhere out of this intolerable place, which is made up of fog and green leaves. Let us go to Paris to begin with; there is not a soul there, and the theatres are _en rélache_, but it is always delightful, and then in a week or so we will go down to Trouville, all the world is there." I couldn't answer him for crying. Perhaps that was best, for I am sure I should have said something wicked, which might have divided us for ever. And then what would people have thought?'

_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._

'MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--Are you already beginning to be miserable about what people will think? Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered. If I were to write to you fifty times I could only repeat what I have always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you ought not to do. _Of two people who are married, there is always one who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary._ The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has become your entire world, but don't suppose for a moment, my child, that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in Nature, that you should be. _If_ you have the intelligence, the tact, and the forbearance required, you _may_ become his friend and counsellor, but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you understand nothing of the masculine temperament. "I see snakes," as the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all, my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse, for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his _vie de garçon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognises her own insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his wife, I daresay he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a grey sky to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels on earth. May Heaven save you from both. _P.S._--Do remember that this same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does. If a rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend it. There is a wholesome truth for you. If you prevent his going to Paris now, he will go in six months' time, and perhaps, then, he will go without you. You are not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel that you sympathise with his pleasures, not that you and his pleasures are enemies. But it is no use to instil wisdom into you; you are very young, and very much in love. You look on all the natural distractions which he inclines to, as on so many rivals. So they may be, but _we don't beat our rivals by abusing them_. The really wise way is to tacitly show that we can be more attractive than they; if we cannot be so, we may sulk or sigh as we will, we shall be vanquished by them. You will think me very preachy-preachy, and, perhaps, you will throw me in the fire unread; but I must say just one word more. Dear, you are in love with Love, but underneath Love there is a real man, and real men are far from ideal creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to consider, to humour, to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will take care of himself; whereas if you bore the real man, Love will fly away. If you had been wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found nothing so delightful as Gyp and Octave de Mirbeau, and you would have declared that the Paris asphalte excelled all the English lawns in the world. He does not love you the less because he wants to be _dans le mouvement_, to hear what other men are saying, and to smoke his cigar amongst his fellow-creatures.'

_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds., England._

'Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite sure of you _then_, and I daresay much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly proper" atmosphere (is not that correct English, "perfectly proper"?) Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double." The days of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us grey hairs before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You _would_ marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!--to put him in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that! You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we play--usually "bac" or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte Nitouche_ drinking tea under a lime tree? I suppose _Sainte Nitouche_ would not permit it, else, why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?'

_From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._

'CARISSIMA MIA,--I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not get out of this damp and verdant Bastile, I shall perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for the moment such, that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get into a passion! It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively delightful to have had a storm. But, no! For an instant she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their dancing places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England, they have a great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself, this enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall _tirer sur le mors_, and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, _cara mia Teresina_, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly, and truly womanlike. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But--there is always such a long and melancholy "but" attached to marriage--she does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons about her a hideous, straight, waterproof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at _Figaro_, and she goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly if she had not shut me up in a country-house in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10 R., and the barometer fixedly at the word _Rainy_, I might have been always charmed with this S. Dorothea-like attitude, and never have found out the monotony of it. But, as it is--I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true one!'

_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._

'PIERO MIO,--In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out when the female bird does not want him to get out; also, she is for ever tightening the wires over his head, and declaring that nothing can be more delightful than the perch which she sits on herself. Come to us here. There are any quantities of birds here who ought to be in their cages, but are not, and manage to enjoy themselves _quand même_. If only you had married Nicoletta! She might have torn your hair occasionally, but she would never have bored you. There is only one supreme art necessary for a woman: it is to thoroughly understand that she must never be a _seccatura_. A woman may be beautiful, admirable, a paragon of virtue, a marvel of intellect, but if she be a _seccatura--addio_! Whereas, she may be plain, small, nothing to look at in any way, and a very monster of sins, big and little, but if she know how to amuse your dull sex, she is mistress of you all. It is evident that this great art is not studied at Coombe Bysset.'

_From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._