Part 6

I do not pretend that there are not many exceptions; but the daughters who are the victims of parental zeal, or parental repression, are so numerous that, in England at any rate, they probably form the majority of their kind. Of those who marry, the greater number may be entirely well-mated. Every one must hope that it is so. Some there are who are not so fortunate; and some, again, begin well but end in disaster,--due to their own mistakes and defects, to those of their husbands, or to unkind circumstances. With the daughters who are favoured by Fortune we have no concern. For the others, there is only one aspect of their case with which I will bore you, and that because it seems to me to be to some extent a corollary to my last letter. If a girl has ideas and intelligence beyond those of her parents; if she has felt constraint and resented it; if she has exercised self-repression, while she longed for sympathy, for expansion, for a measure of freedom--such an experience, especially if it has lasted for any time, is not the best preparation for marriage. Married life--where man and woman are in complete sympathy, where mutual affection and admiration make self-sacrifice a joy, and trouble taken for the other a real satisfaction--is not altogether an easy path to tread, with sure and willing feet, from the altar to the grave. Many would give much to be able to turn back: but there is no return. So some faint and others die; some never cease from quarrelling; some accept the inevitable and lose all interest in life; while a few get off the road, over the barriers, break their necks or their hearts, or simply disappear out of the ken, beyond the vision, of their kind.

I think much of the unhappiness that comes to be a millstone round the necks of married people is due, primarily, to the deep ignorance of womankind so commonly displayed by mankind. It is a subject that is not taught, probably because no man would be found conceited enough to profess more than the most superficial knowledge of it. Some Eastern writers have gone into the question, but their point of view differs from ours, as do their climate, their religion, their temperament, habits, and moral code. Their teachings are difficult to obtain; they are written in languages not commonly understood, and they deal with races and societies that have little in common with Europeans. Michelet has, however, produced a book that may be read with advantage by all those who wish to acquire a few grains of knowledge on a subject that has such an enthralling interest at some period of most men’s lives. It is not exactly easy to indicate other aids to an adequate conception of the feminine gender, but they will not be found in the streets and gutters of great cities.

The school-boy shuns girls. He is parlously ignorant of all that concerns them, except that they cannot compete with him in strength and endurance. He first despises them for their comparative physical weakness; then, as he grows a little older, a certain shyness of the other sex seizes him; but this usually disappears with the coming of real manhood, when his instincts prompt him to seek women’s society. What he learns then, unless he is very fortunate, will not help him to understand and fully appreciate the girl who somewhat later becomes his wife--indeed, it is more likely to mislead him and contribute to her unhappiness. Unite this inexperienced, or over-experienced, youth with the girl who is ready to accept almost any one who will take her from an uncongenial home, and it says a good deal for the Western world that the extraordinary difficulties of the position should, in so large a proportion of cases, be overcome as well as they are.

In the rage for higher education, why does not some philanthropic lady, some many-times-married man, open a seminary for the instruction of inexperienced men who wish to take into their homes, for life and death, companions, of whose sex generally, their refined instincts, tender feelings, reckless impulses, strange cravings, changeful moods, overpowering curiosity, attitudes of mind, methods of attack and defence, signals of determined resistance or speedy capitulation, they know, perhaps, as little as of the Grand Llama. What an opportunity such a school would afford to the latest development of woman to impress her own views upon the rising generation of men! How easily she might mould them to her fancy, or, at least, plant in them seeds of repentance, appreciation, and constancy, to grow up under the care of wives for whose society the Benedictentiary would have somewhat fitted them.

It is really an excellent idea, this combination of Reformatory of the old man and Education of the new. Can you not see all the newspapers full of advertisements like this:--

PREPARATION OF GENTLEMEN FOR MATRIMONY

The great success which has attended all those who have gone through the course of study at the Benedictentiary of Mesdames ---- has led the proprietors to add another wing to this popular institution. The buildings are situated in park-like grounds, far from any disturbing influences. The lecturers are ladies of personal attraction with wide experience, and the discipline of the establishment is of the severest kind compatible with comfort. A special feature of this institution is the means afforded for healthy recreation of all kinds, the object being to make the students attractive in every sense. Gentlemen over fifty years of age are only admitted on terms which can be learnt by application to the Principal. These terms will vary according to the character of the applicant. During the last season twenty-five of Mesdames ---- pupils made brilliant marriages, and the most flattering testimonials are constantly being received from the wives of former students. There are only a few vacancies, and application should be made at once to the Principal.

That is the sort of thing. Do you know any experienced lady in want of a vocation that might combine profit with highly interesting employment? You can give her this suggestion, but advise her to be careful in her choice of lecturers, and let the ladies combine the wisdom of the serpent with the gentle cooing of the dove; otherwise, some possible husbands might be spoilt in the making.

XIII

HER FIANCÉ

You say that my opinions are very unorthodox, that my views on human constancy are cynical, and that it is wicked to sympathise with children who oppose their inclinations to the behests of their parents.

Do you forget that I said we should not agree, and will you be angry if I venture to suggest that you have not read my letters very carefully, or that your sense of justice is temporarily obscured? If I dared, I would ask you to look again at the letters, and then tell me exactly wherein I have sinned. I maintained that all are not gifted with that perfect constancy which distinguished Helen and Guinevere, and a few other noble ladies whose names occur to me. I notice that, as regards yourself, you disdain to answer my question, and we might safely discuss the subject without reference to personal considerations.

My regrets over the strained relations which sometimes exist between parents and children could hardly be construed into an incitement to rebellion. They did not amount to more than a statement of lamentable facts, and a diagnosis of the causes of the trouble. When you add that truth is often disagreeable and better left unspoken, I will subscribe to the general principle, but fail to see its application here. Nor can I agree with you that problems of this sort are lacking in interest. To be able to construct a geometrical figure, and prove that the method is correct, does not sound very interesting; but architects, who have knowledge of this kind, have achieved results that appeal to those who look at the finished work, without thought of the means by which the end was gained.

With your permission, I will move the inquiry to new ground; and do not think I am wavering in my allegiance, or that my loyalty is open to doubt, if I say one word on behalf of man, whose unstable affections are so widely recognised that no sensible person would seek to dispute the verdict of all the ages. He is represented as loving a sex rather than an individual; is likened to the bee which sucks where sweetness can be found and only whilst it lasts; he shares with the butterfly the habit of never resting long on any flower, and, like it, he is drawn by brilliant colouring and less clean attractions. Virtuous affection and plain solid worth do not appeal to him.

These are articles of popular belief, and must not be questioned; but I may say to you, that they do the poor man somewhat less than justice. As a bachelor, he has few opportunities of examining virtuous affection, on his own account; the experiences of his friends are not always encouraging; and, if he has to work, other things absorb most of his attention at this stage of his existence. If he marries, especially if he marries young, he is often enthusiastic, and usually hopelessly ignorant of feminine methods, inclinations, and fastidious hesitation. He feels an honest, blundering, but real and passionate affection. He shows it, and that is not seldom an offence. He looks for a reciprocation of his passion, and when, as often happens, he fully realises that his transports awaken no responsive feeling, but rather a scarcely veiled disgust, his enthusiasm wanes, he cultivates self-repression, and assumes a chilly indifference that, in time, becomes the true expression of his changed feelings. From this keen disappointment, this sense of his own failure in his own home, the transition to a state of callousness, and thence, to one of deep interest in another object where his advances are met in a different spirit, is not very difficult.

You see, I am taking for granted that the popular conception of his shortcomings in regard to the affections is correct, and I only want to suggest some of the reasons which have earned for him such a bad reputation. First, it is the fault of his nature, for which he is not altogether responsible; it is different to yours. In this respect he starts somewhat unfairly handicapped, if his running is tried by the same standard as that fixed for the gentler sex. Then his education, not so much in the acquirement of book-knowledge as in the ways of the world, is also different. His physical robustness is thought to qualify him, when still a boy, to go anywhere, to see everything at close quarters, and without a chaperone. He is thrown into the maelstrom of life, and there he is practically left to sink or swim; and whether he drown or survive, he must pass through the deep water where only his own efforts will save him. A few disappear altogether, and, while all get wet, some come out covered with mud, and others are maimed, or their constitutions permanently injured by the immersion.

That is the beginning, and I think you will admit that, except in a few very peculiar cases, the boy’s early life is more calculated to smirch than to preserve his original innocence.

Then he settles down to work for a living or for ambition, and, in either case, he is left but little time to study the very complex complement of his life, woman. If he does not incontinently fall in love with what appeals to his eye, he deliberately looks about for some one who may make him a good, a useful, and, if possible, an ornamental wife. In the first case he is really to be pitied; but his condition only excites amusement. The man is treated as temporarily insane, and every one looks to the consummation of the marriage as the only means to restore him to his right mind. That, indeed, is generally the result, but not for the reason to which the cure is popularly ascribed. The swain is very much in love, whereas the lady of his choice is entering into the contract for a multitude of reasons, where passionate affection, very probably, plays quite an inferior part. The man’s ardour destroys any discretion he may have. He digs a pit for himself and falls into it, and, unless he has great experience, unusual sympathy, or consummate tact, he misunderstands the signs, draws false conclusions, and nurses the seeds of discontent which will sooner or later come up and bear bitter fruit.

If, on the other hand, he deliberately enters the matrimonial market and makes his choice with calm calculation, as he would enter the mart to supply any other need, he may run less risk of disappointment. But the other party to the bargain will, in due time, come to regret the part she has undertaken to play, and feel that what the man wanted was less a wife than a housekeeper, a hostess, a useful ally, or an assistant in the preservation of a family name. Very few women would fail to discover the truth in such a case, and probably none would neglect to mention it. Neither the fact, the discovery, nor the mention of it will help to make a happy home.

With husbands and wives, if neither have any need to work, it ought to be easy to avoid boredom (the most gruesome of all maladies), and to accommodate themselves to each other’s wishes. They, however, constitute a very small proportion of society. A man usually has to work all day, and, if he is strong and healthy, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that his only thought, when his work is over, should be how he can best amuse his wife. If he sets that single object before him as his duty or his pleasure, and his wife accepts the sacrifice, the man’s health is almost certain to suffer, unless there is some form of exercise which they can enjoy together.

Husbands and wives take a good deal for granted, and it is more curious that lovers, who are bound by no such tie, often meet with shipwreck on exactly the same sort of dangers. To be too exacting is probably, of all causes, the most fertile in parting devoted lovers.

But enough of speculation. Pardon my homily, and let me answer your question. You ask me what has become of the man we used to see so constantly, sitting in the Park with a married lady who evidently enjoyed his society. I will tell you, and you will then understand why it is that you have not seen him since that summer when we too found great satisfaction in each other’s company. He was generally “about the town,” and when not there seemed rather to haunt the river. Small blame to him for that; there is none with perceptions so dead that the river, on a hot July day, will not appeal to them. I cannot tell how long afterwards it was, but the man became engaged to a girl who was schooling or travelling in France. She was the sister of the woman we used to see in the Park. _Un bel giorno_ the man and his future sister-in-law started for the Continent, to see his _fiancée_. Arrived at Dover, the weather looked threatening, or the lady wanted rest, or it was part of the arrangement--details of this kind are immaterial--anyhow, they decided to stay the night in an hotel and cross the following morning. In the grey light which steals through darkness and recoils from day, some wanderer or stolid constable saw a white bundle lying on the pavement by the wall of the hotel. A closer examination showed this to be the huddled and shattered body of a man in his night-dress; a very ghastly sight, for he was dead. It was the man we used to see in the Park, and several storeys above the spot where he was found were the windows, not of his room, but of another. I do not know whether the lady continued her journey; but, if she did, her interview with her sister must have been a bad experience.

XIV

BY THE SEA

You asked me to paint you a picture--a picture of a wonderful strand half-circling a space of sunlit sea; an island-studded bay, girt, landwards, by a chain of low blue hills, whose vesture of rich foliage is, through all the years, mirrored in the dazzling waters that bathe those rocky feet. The bay is enclosed between two headlands, both lofty, both rising sheer out of the sea, but that on the north juts out only a little, while the southern promontory is much bolder, and terminates a long strip of land running at right angles to the shore out into very deep water.

The beach between these headlands forms an arc of a circle, and the cord joining its extremities would be about seven miles in length, while following the shore the distance is nearly ten miles.

One might search east or west, the Old World or the New, and find in them few places so attractive as this little-known and sparsely inhabited dent in a far Eastern coast.

Here the sky is nearly always bright; a day which, in its thirteen hours of light, does not give at least half of brilliant, perhaps too brilliant sunshine, is almost unknown. Then it is the sunshine of endless summer, not for a month or a season, but for ever.

Except on rare occasions, the winds from the sea are softest zephyrs, the land breezes are cool and fragrant, sufficient only to stir the leaves of trees and gently ruffle the placid surface of the bay.

The waters of the bay are green--green like a yellow emerald--but in some few places, near the shore, this changes into a warm brown. The beach is a wide stretch of sand broken by rocks of dark umber or Indian red. The sand is, in some places, so startlingly white that the eye can hardly bear the glare of it, while in others it is mixed with fine-broken grains of the ironstone called laterite, and this gives a burnt-sienna colour to the beach. When the tide is high, the great stretches of hard, clean sand are covered with water to a depth of between five and ten feet, and, owing to the absence of mud, mangroves, and mankind, the waters of the bay are of an extraordinary limpidity. The beach in many places dips steeply, so that, at high tide, there are six feet of water within two or three yards of the trees, shrubs, ferns, and creepers that clothe the shore in an abandonment of wild and graceful luxuriance. The sand shines beneath the waters of the sea like powdered diamonds, and all the myriads of pebbles and shells glisten and scintillate, with a fire and life and colour which they lose when the tide falls and leaves the sands dry, but for the little pools that fill the depressions of a generally even surface.

Then, however, is the time to see strange shells moving slowly about, and crabs, of marvellous colour and unexpected instincts, scampering in hundreds over the purple rocks, that here and there make such a striking contrast to the brilliant orange and red, or the startling whiteness of the sand in which they lie half-embedded.

And how positively delightful it is to paddle with bare feet between and over these rounded stones, while the tireless waters make continents and oceans in miniature, and the strange denizens of this life-charged summer sea destroy each other, in the ceaseless struggle to preserve an existence for which they are no more responsible than we are. Here is an army of scarlet-backed crabs, hunting in battalions for something smaller and weaker than its own tiny, fragile units. The spider-like legion, alarmed by the approach of your naked feet, scuttles hurriedly towards a new Red Sea, and, dashing recklessly into the two inches of water, which are running between banks of sandy desert, disappears as completely as Pharaoh and his host. Unlike the Egyptian king, however, the crabs, which have only burrowed into the sand, will presently reappear on the other shore and scour the desert for a morning meal.

And then you are standing amongst the rocks, on a point of a bay within the bay; and, as the rippling wavelets wash over your feet, you peer down into the deeper eddies and pools in search of a sea-anemone. Again, you exclaim in childish admiration of the marvellous colouring of a jelly-fish and his puzzling fashion of locomotion, or your grown-up experience allows you an almost pleasurable little shudder when you think of the poisonous possibilities of this tenderly-tinted, gauzily-gowned digestive system.

The land is not less rich in life than the sea. Nature has fringed the waters with a garden of graceful trees, flowering shrubs, brilliantly blossomed creepers, and slender ferns, far more beautiful in their untrained luxuriance than any effort of human ingenuity could have made them. There are magnolias, sweeping the waters with their magnificent creamy blossoms, made more conspicuous by their background of great, dark green leaves. There are gorgeous yellow alamanders, each blossom as large as a hand; soft pale pink myrtles, star-flowered jasmines, and the delicate wax-plant with its clusters of red or white blossoms. These and a multitude of others, only known by barbarous botanical names, nestle into each other’s arms, interlace their branches, and form arbours of perfumed shade. Close behind stand almond and cashew trees, tree-ferns, coconuts, and sago palms, and then the low hills, clothed with the giants of a virgin forest, that shut out any distant view.

Groups of sandpipers paddle in the little wavelets that lovingly caress the shore; birds of the most gorgeous plumage flit through the jungle with strange cries; and, night and morning, flocks of pigeons, plumed in green and yellow, in orange and brown, flash meteor-like trails of colour, in their rapid flight from mainland to island and back again. The bay is studded with islets, some near, some far, tiny clusters of trees growing out of the water, or a mass of stone, clothed from base to summit with heavy jungle, except for a narrow band of red rocks above the water’s edge.

Sailing in and out the islands, rounding the headlands, or standing across the bay, are boats with white or brown or crimson sails; boats of strange build, with mat or canvas sails of curious design, floating, like tired birds, upon the restful waters of this “changeless summer sea.”

But you remember it all: how we sat under the great blossoms and shining leaves of the magnolias, and, within arm’s length, found treasures of opal-tinted pebbles, and infinite variety of tiny shells, coral-pink and green and heliotrope,--and everything seemed very good indeed.

A mass of dark-red boulders, overlying a bed of umber rock, ran out into the water, closing, as with a protecting arm, one end of the little inlet, while the forest-clad hill, rising sheer from the point, shut out everything beyond. And then the road! bright _terra cotta_, winding round the bluff through masses of foliage in every shade of green,--giant trees, a maze of undergrowth, and the dew-laden ferns and mosses, blazing with emerald fires under the vagrant shafts of sunlight;--_dies cretâ notanda_.

Do you remember how, when the sun had gone, and the soft, fragrant, Eastern night brought an almost tangible darkness, lighted only by the stars, we returned across the bay in a little boat, with two quaintly coloured paper lanterns making a bright spot of colour high above the bow? The only sound to break the measured cadence of the oars was the gentle whisper of the land-wind through the distant palm leaves, and the sighing of the tide as it wooed the passive beach.

And then, as we glided slowly through the starlit darkness, you, by that strange gift of sympathetic intuition, answered my unspoken thought, and sang the _Allerseelen_, sang it under your breath, “soft and low,” as though it might not reach any ears but ours--yes, that was All Souls’ Day.

There was only the sea and the sky and the stars, only the perfection of aloneness, “_Le rêve de rester ensemble sans dessein_.”

And then, all too soon, we came to a space of lesser darkness, visible through the belt of trees which lined the shore; far down that water-lane twinkled a light, the beacon of our landing-place. Do you remember?----

XV

AN ILLUMINATION