Part 5

But, after all, what is to be Miss Singleton’s ultimate aim in life? She cannot fill her whole existence with dances, tennis, and flirtations, for time will have something serious to say on that subject. Say she is five-and-thirty now; in another five years she will have leisure from her present pastimes to realise her want of new interests. She may not personally feel that age is creeping on apace, but she will be made sensible of the fact by all kinds of external signs. She will find that, though the marriages of her brothers and sisters, and other contemporaries of her girlhood, at first made little difference in their attitude towards her, the increasing and growing-up of their families make a very great difference, and, naturally, the interest that is taken in herself must under these conditions become gradually lessened. A new generation of girls will have ousted her from the arena of flirtation, for the spinster of forty stands but little chance against the girl of twenty, though her wit be twenty times as great, and her charms be all the more telling for long practice. And then her interests will become narrower as her field of interest is reduced in dimensions by the encroachments of time and its consequences, until an utter sense of loneliness and uncaredforness sets in, and then—God help her!

But I would let Miss Singleton’s story point a moral for all spinsters. Because one man gave her a bitter draught to swallow, she allowed herself to believe, until too late, that there was no more sweetness in the world; because one man proved false, she withdrew her faith from all men; and so she has missed the blessings of domestic love, the wife’s happiness, the mother’s joys, and so some good man has missed a good wife.

_THE INDIVIDUAL WOMAN_

Miss Strongith’will believes in herself and has the courage of her individuality. She is no advertising advocate of Woman’s Rights, as spelt with a capital W and a capital R; but she quietly asserts the right of woman to live her own life, to mould her own mind, to shape her own destiny, on equal terms with man, but in her own womanly way. She does not proclaim aloud from a platform that she has a mission; she makes no attempt at public philanthropy, and works among no paupers; she does not wear a divided skirt and ride far afield for notoriety; she does not lecture at learned societies; nor does she run about the world looking at loathsome diseases, and wheedling guileless journalists into writing her down a heroine. She is simply a woman who believes that woman’s life can be quite complete without man, and she acts up to that belief by trying to make her own life self-contained and independent. To Miss Strongith’will the mere fact of being married or not is an extraneous circumstance, a matter of accident, opportunity, or inclination, which has nothing to do with a woman’s individualism. She can assert her own entity, whether she has a husband or not. At least, this is Miss Strongith’will’s theory, and she does not pretend to belong to the profession of strong-minded women. She has no sympathy with them; to her they are an impertinence, not because their minds happen to be strong, or perhaps unfeminine, but because they label themselves, and profess to despise any other brand.

Miss Strongith’will is the eldest of a large family; her parents are well provided with the means of life, their social position is such that the most refined and cultured society is open to them, and they have seen the wisdom and justice of giving their children the advantages of excellent education. In fact, the surroundings of Miss Strongith’will’s life have been in every way conducive to the cultivation of her individuality. She has enjoyed the friendship of men and women of culture, and has had the advantage of contrasting them with the commonplace and the uncultured. She has had the invaluable opportunity of travelling in foreign countries not merely holiday scampers through Continental towns, but sojourns for months at a time in the very centres of the social, artistic, and intellectual life of several countries, into which she has been admitted on intimate terms. She has thus learnt to regard the world in a cosmopolitan spirit, to look upon life in a large way. She has been forced to think for herself by the very eclecticism of her training, but this very cosmopolitanism, while enlarging her mind, has narrowed her heart to individuals. It has made her difficult to please, and impatient of any attempt to coerce her affections. It has deprived her of a husband.

Miss Strongith’will would be very indignant—very angry—if any one suggested that she ever wanted a husband; not that she has anything but respect and admiration for the domestic affections, for the peaceful beauties of home, for the lovely relations of parents and children, brothers and sisters. But she would resent the implication that she could not have been married had she so desired. As a matter of fact, she has had love affairs and offers of marriage; but those which she had before experience and critical judgment had tempered her susceptibility, were of the ineligible order—the medical student with a practice in prospect, the briefless barrister, the young artist who ought to be “on the line,” if only the Academicians were not so jealous, and so on. But these were in the days when a dance would lure her from any studies, when she was not above being flattered by the attentions of a “nice young man,” and before she had realised that “life is earnest, life is real, life is not an empty dream.” Now, however, she has become serious and superior, and the ordinary young man who flirts and dances and plays tennis is as nought to her. Men interest her, she says, intellectually, and only according to the measure of their mental powers or artistic sensibilities does she value their companionship. Let no man dare to talk frivolously to her; she would resent it as an insult to her understanding. If he attempted to pay conventional compliments, he would receive such a snub as should serve him for a lifetime, and put a check on the honeyed side of his tongue for evermore.

But Miss Strongith’will is not a stone, she is full of humanity, full of sympathy for those who suffer and those who struggle for existence or strive to realise lofty aspirations. She is only hard upon women who lower their natures for the love of men, who submit to martyrdom, or turn sour because they have been disappointed in love. She contends that love is not, as Byron has it, “woman’s whole existence,” but that, as the poet says with regard to man, it is of her life “a thing apart”—a beautiful thing that adorns her life and makes it more lovely, but not absolutely necessary as an active influence. But it could hardly be that a woman who thinks and theorises about love has never felt its magic spell, that she has never known the beautiful joy of loving and of being loved. Miss Strongith’will’s individualism is opposed to any outward show of emotion, and an ordinary acquaintance, even a friend, would never quite penetrate to her heart’s secrets. She never talks of her love affair—her great love affair, I mean, which changed the girl to woman, and made her herself. But I know something of what it was to her, what she suffered with the disappointment.

He was not an ordinary lover, he was not an ordinary man. He was a visionary, a poet, a dreamer, with a genius for planning great works and achieving none. He was full of ideas, vague, beautiful ideas which remained abstract, but never took concrete form. He would conceive lovely lyrics, imagine glorious epics, dream splendid dramas—and write a few columns for the newspapers. He was always going to do something, but time went by, and he did nothing, that is, nothing worthy of his undoubted abilities. He started life with brilliant promise, and probably had he known Miss Strongith’will in the days of his promise, he might have given the world something to remember, but he was naturally indolent and terribly sensitive, he hated the actual labour of writing, and the process of materialising his imagination, of reducing his ideas to words, destroyed their charm for him. He would revel in a fancy, but he could never satisfy himself in giving it form and expression, and he would not expose to unsympathetic criticism his dreams and fancies in forms which did not fully realise them. Thus he was frittering away his time, his opportunities, and such talents as were his when he met Miss Strongith’will.

He had just written enough in his time to reveal latent possibilities of literary achievement, and his poetic temperament appealed to her imagination. It touched her sentimentally as she had never been touched before, at the same time that it stirred her intellectually. She felt that here was a man with talent, but without the requisite impulse of industry; what if she should make him achieve something noble and endurable? Like Keats, he declared himself for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. She would try and help him to combine both sensation and thought, with the result that he should produce poems worthy to live. His intellectual inertness should be corrected by her strength of mind. He should yet be great through her sympathy, her aid, her love. For she loved him; his very frailty of temperament, his acute sensitiveness, his lack of self-reliance, all appealed to her strong nature, and she gave him that love which is all the deeper because it feels bound to protect its object. But his imagination was not satisfied by love of this order, it was not sufficiently romantic, his temperament needed passionate response rather than intellectual aid. She loved him entirely in her womanly way, and according to the utmost possibilities of her nature, in which, however the intellectual element dominated the emotional, whereas in her lover’s nature it was the reverse. So, while he grew impatient and weary, she began to realise a sense of disappointment.

For a long time she hoped against hope that he was really worthy of the love she gave him, that he would do something to make the world respect him; but he had encouraged his nature to yearn for an ideal love, which should mean complete mutual self-surrender, the making of two lives one. The idea of female individualism he admitted was just, but it did not suit him, the substitution of intellectual sympathy and serene sentiment for that passionate love which must absorb every function of soul and body, left his life still unfulfilled. Literary achievement and fame could not fill it, only woman’s love could do that, only the love that maintains no distinct individuality, the love that gives and takes all. Aspasia would have suited him, as Walter Savage Landor draws her. “We cannot love without imitating,” she says, “and we are as proud in the loss of our originality as of our freedom.” But this was not Miss Strongith’will’s way of loving; to lose any measure of one’s individuality even in love was, in her eyes, to be degraded. Yet she loved deeply in her way, and when her impressionable, idealist lover, without any thought of inconstancy, took his love to another, whose nature he deemed more in sympathy with his own, Miss Strongith’will suffered a bitter blow and a deep wound.

She uttered no complaint, however, and few ever knew that she had been in love, much less that she had found it disappointing. But the experience seemed to open out her life, she saw clearer, her knowledge of human motives and feelings was widened, and she felt more than ever that woman can live individually and independently. She did not, however, perceive that she had met her disappointment through not attempting to weld her own individuality with that of the man she had loved without understanding. But after that she believed implicitly in herself, and determined to follow her own pursuits, to live as independently as if she were a man, and, thrown on her own resources, compelled to earn her own living, a duty she considers every woman owes to herself.

What would be Miss Strongith’will’s views on individualism were she a happy wife and the mother of a large family, whether she would still consider that a woman has the right to live exclusively according to her own tastes and inclinations, I cannot tell; I think she would find it rather difficult in practice. As it is, however, Miss Strongith’will is happily situated, for she is the beloved of her immediate family, among whom she is regarded as a superior being who ought to have her own way in everything.

She is the oracle of the house, and she rules accordingly. Perhaps her constant habit of self-reliance has made her a little dogmatic and impatient of contradiction. She has the courage of her own opinions, and the pugnacity of them. It is not wise to differ from them unless you be prepared to pummel her with logic and authority. Then you may have a chance with her in argument, but with all her strength of will and self-reliance, she is a very woman, and her reason will often be none but a woman’s reason, “I think it so, because I think it so.” She “sees life steadily,” and if she does not see it quite whole, she certainly has a good view of it, and from her coign of vantage she perceives the devious ways of women who have no vocation. Therefore, she devotes herself to art as a profession, with just the same enthusiasm as a man of fortune strives in the City to increase his banking account. She has not the stimulus of necessity, but she feels a certain triumphant satisfaction in doing what she is not obliged to do.

She has artistic aspirations, why should she not pursue them with as much avidity as if her livelihood depended upon her success? Why, she argues, should a woman only take to professional work when she cannot depend upon men to work for her? And why should she be accused of taking the bread out of poorer women’s mouths because she sells pictures, when her father or husband is able and willing to give her as much as she wants? No, Miss Strongith’will realises the sordid fact that money is the chief incentive to all work, and that work is valued according to its price; therefore she claims the right for women to work for money according to their instincts, abilities, and inclinations, without exciting any more remark than a man would who worked under similar circumstances. But though Miss Strongith’will asserts woman’s right to independence and the courage of her individuality, she is none the less womanly, none the less gentle and steadfastly affectionate to those she knows intimately, and those who understand her. Would she have been more so had she been happily married, so that her own individuality had blended harmoniously with that of the man she loved, and had become greater for motherhood? That is the question.

_THE SUBMISSIVE WOMAN_

I remember, when I was a little boy, a beautiful young woman and a very handsome man coming to my father’s house, and these were husband and wife. And I looked upon him with a sort of worshipful wonder, for they told me he was a brave soldier, and had fought gloriously in battles. At that period of my life my young imagination was quickened by every story of adventure, and the only books or pictures that appealed to me were those that told of battle, or of the doughty deeds of soldiers and sailors. The sword seemed to me then far mightier than the pen, which latter I regarded merely as an instrument of scholastic torture.

Imagine my great pride and joy, therefore, when this real live hero talked to me as familiarly as any schoolboy of my own age, and when, looking over some pictures of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which were among my treasures, he told me how he had stormed the heights of Alma and captured Sebastopol, how he had relieved Lucknow, and blown thousands of mutinous Sepoys from the guns. I listened to him with all my sense and spirit. How graphically he described the fights, remembering every detail, even to the name of the little bugler who sounded the “cease firing,” and the exact expression of the Sepoys the moment before the guns were fired that should blow them to eternity! I drank it all in, and thought there never was such a great man in the world as Captain Marshall Meek. No wonder that his sweet and gentle wife cast such constant looks of affectionate pride upon him. She was indeed a fortunate woman to be the wife of such a hero, and I regarded her with boyish enthusiasm, because of her heroic husband’s reflected light. To me they were the most romantic couple I had ever met, for they embodied beauty and chivalry—such as I had read and dreamt of. They might have been Lancelot and Guinevere for me and they remained impressed upon my young memory, she as the beautiful daughter of a distinguished family, he as an ideal soldier, handsome and brave.

I did not see them again till I had reached man’s estate, and then they came once more to my father’s house. But what a change had the years wrought! He was now a shaky, middle-aged man, with alternate intervals of boisterous merriment and ill-temper, and only the reminiscent suggestion of his old gallant bearing and good looks; while she was an absolute wreck of her former self. Her fair, plump features were now sallow and shrunk, her bright, gentle countenance told of nothing but sorrow, suffering, and anxiety; her full, elegant figure had become attenuated beyond recognition. The old regard of proud affection had given place to a haunted, restless look of fear, of expectancy of something terrible. Yes, a few years had transformed the gallant soldier into a confirmed drunkard and bully, and the poor wife into his abject slave.

It was a pitiful story. He had had a sunstroke in India—the original excuse of so many drunkards—and a craving for stimulant had succeeded. Stronger and stronger grew the craving, weaker and weaker the power of resistance, until the habit of drink became so strong that the case was quite a scandal. “Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” was the official designation given to the offence for which he was cashiered from the army, and social ruin was the result. And down with the disgraced man went the wife and children. Society always generalises, and the stain of a name clings to the innocent bearers of it. Of course people pitied poor Mrs. Meek, but with such a husband who could visit her? So, with ruined career, with name disgraced, with shattered constitution, Captain Marshall Meek brought his family home to England, and by undue extravagance and gambling speedily exhausted the income his wife had brought him as dowry. His social disgrace seemed to have made him desperate—his weakness for drink certainly rendered him insensible to all the finer feelings of manhood, and he spared his wife no humiliation.

She was the daughter of a proud and distinguished man, who had won his baronetcy by splendid services to the State, whose father and grandfather before him had won honourable reward from a grateful country. The men and women of her family were proud and spirited to an unusual degree, and when she went to them, socially and financially beggared, to ask assistance for her children, they answered her that she must separate herself from her drunken and disgraceful husband, and then they would see what could be done for her.

But Mrs. Meek was wife before everything; whatever her husband had done, however he might drag her and their children down, whatever he might make her suffer in body and spirit, she was still his wife, and as she had vowed at the altar to love, honour, and obey, so would she strive to fulfil her vows. Therefore pitying and forgiving those of her kinsfolk who had urged her to what she considered the breaking of the marriage vow, she gave up all hope of their assistance, and determined to try and eke out what little was left of her fortune as best she could. Her pride had been sadly humbled, but she still had a remnant of independence. She still hoped to redeem her husband’s reputation, and woo him from the injurious ways of drink.

It was at this period that I met again the hero and heroine who had so captivated my boyish fancy, and never shall I forget the shock of recognition. They seemed to have been transformed by some sort of metempsychosis-while-you-wait process. The Captain’s old buoyancy had given place to irritability pretending to be joviality—a miserable sham, practised exclusively for company. And this seemed to alarm his wife far more than his outbursts of drunken passion, for then she knew that the bully was uppermost, while the cunning of his pretended humour puzzled her, and kept her upon tenter-hooks, fearing what he might say or do.

It was a miserable life for her, poor thing. She, who had lived her youth in luxury, and her early married life in comfort and amid brilliant social surroundings, was now compelled to endure every degradation that genteel poverty and social vagabondage could inflict. They were very poor, yet her good-for-nothing husband insisted upon an outward show of gentility which he had not the grace to support. He would drink in private and in public, he would debase his manhood, and bully his long-suffering wife, but he would drain the very scanty family purse to preserve a pretence of social position. The children were growing up, but little were they heeded, except as servants and errand-boys. Education befitting the sons and daughters of an “officer and gentleman” was out of the question; all the cash that could be squeezed out of the domestic exchequer was appropriated by the Captain for his personal expenses, his clothes, and his drink. Poor Mrs. Meek had to find clothing for the boys and girls as best she might, just as she had to keep the household going. For herself, one or two black silk dresses which had seen better days served her through years of humiliation. She had lost the semblance of gentility, and only tried to make herself look a little smarter when her husband rated her for forgetting her position. Her position, indeed!

And she submitted to all this humiliation, she allowed herself and her children to be dragged down lower and lower, she offended beyond reconciliation the rich, proud relatives who could have helped her, because they expressed their just resentment against her husband and their indignation at her obstinate martyrdom, all simply for love of this man who was quite unworthy of it. She had never heard of Individualism; the thought of a woman having a free soul, with an independent life of her own to work out, had probably never entered her head. She was one of those women who think that the whole duty of woman is towards her husband, be he good or bad, tender or cruel, devoted or selfish. That he has broken his marriage vows does not relieve her of the obligation of hers—she must be faithful to the end. And so Mrs. Meek suppressed her independent womanhood for the sake of a worthless man. There was no question of clinging to an ideal of her girlhood, that was broken long since, and Mrs. Meek was not an idealising woman; she saw things as they were, but she thought it was her duty to try and soften their brutality. If there was little of the old love remaining, there was the old slavish devotion, and the submission of her individuality to his caprice. She retained the mediæval notion that the husband was the wife’s lord and master, and when misfortunes, albeit of his own making, came upon him and involved her, she considered that it was all the more obligatory for her to unself herself, so as to give him the more consideration. She had joined her lot to his for better or for worse, and, as she would not have thought of leaving him had it been better, she would not desert him when fortune was at its worst. Let him humiliate her as he would, she would be a martyr in the sacred cause of wifely devotion.