The Romance of His Life Part 25

EUGENIA [_with benignant dignity_]. I am all for the equality of the s.e.xes within certain limits, the limits imposed by nature. But the long and the short of it is, to put it bluntly, no man, my dear Henry, can give birth to a child, and until he can he will be ineligible by the laws of nature, not by any woman-made edict, to govern, and the less he talks about it the better. Sensible men and older men know that and hold their tongues, and women respect their silence. Man has his sphere, and a very important and useful sphere in life it is. The defence of the nation is entrusted to him. Where should we be without our trusty soldiers and sailors, and, as you have just reminded me, our admirable police force? Where physical strength comes in men are paramount. When I think of all the work men are doing in the world I a.s.sure you, Henry, my respect and admiration for them knows no bounds. But if they step outside their own sphere of labour, then--

HENRY. But if only you would look into the old records, as I have been doing, you would see that Lord Curzon and Lord James and Lord Cromer, and many others employed these same arguments in order to withhold the suffrage from women.

EUGENIA. I dare say.

HENRY. And there is another thing which does not seem to me to be fair. Men are so ridiculed if they are suffragists. _Punchinella_ always draws them as obese disappointed old bachelors, and there are many earnest young married men among the ranks of the suffragists.

Look at the procession which has just pa.s.sed. Our best men were in it. And to look at _Punchinella_ or to listen to the speeches in the House you would think that the men who want the vote are mostly repulsive old bachelors stung by the neglect of women. Why only last week the member for Maidenhead, Mrs. Colthorpe it was got up and said that if only this "brawling brotherhood" of single gentlemen, who had missed domestic bliss, could find wives they would not trouble their heads about reinfranchis.e.m.e.nt.

EUGENIA. There is no doubt there is an element of s.e.x resentment in the movement, dear Henry. That is why I have always congratulated myself on the fact that, you, as my husband, were opposed to it.

HENRY. Personally I can't imagine now that women have the upper hand why they don't keep up their number numerically. It is their only safeguard against our one day regaining the vote. It was their numerical majority plus adult suffrage which suddenly put them in the position to disfranchise men. And yet women are allowing their number to decline and decline until really for all practical purposes there seems to be about two men to every woman.

EUGENIA. The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now about the surplusage of men?

HENRY. Then there is another point. You talk so much about the importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my heart. But there are so few women to marry nowadays, and women show such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is quite over, that half the men I know can't get wives at all. And those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and childless.

EUGENIA. The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh's time, and there were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and men said nothing _then_ about the deterioration of the race. They did not even make drunkards' marriages a penal offence. Drunkards and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and had children in those days.

HENRY. I can't think the situation was as difficult for women as it is now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and Professors have been able to find mates. Women won't look at them.

EUGENIA. In the nineteenth century, when first women went to Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters.

HENRY. And I a.s.sure you the amount of hysteria and quarrelling among the older Dons is lamentable.

EUGENIA. I appointed a committee which reported to me on the subject last year, and I gathered that the present Dons are not more hysterical than they were in Victorian days, when they forfeited their fellowships on marriage. You must remember, Henry, that from the earliest times men and women have always hated anything "blue"

in the opposite s.e.x. Female blue stockings were seldom attractive to men in bygone days. And nowadays women are naturally inclined to marry young men, and healthy and athletic men, rather than sedentary old male blue stockings. It is most fortunate for the race that is is so.

HENRY [_with a sigh_]. Well, all the "blue" women can marry nowadays.

EUGENIA. Yes, thank heaven, _all_ women can marry nowadays. What women must have endured in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century makes me shudder. For if they did not marry they were never spared the ridicule or the contemptuous compa.s.sion of men. It seems incredible, looking back, to realise that large families of daughters were kept idle and unhappy at home, after their youth was over, not allowed to take up any profession, only to be turned callously adrift in their middle age at their father's death, with a pittance on which they could barely live. And yet these things were done by educated and kindly men who professed to care for the interests of women, and were personally fond of their daughters.

Over and over again in the biographies of notable women of the Victorian and Edward the Seventh's time one comes across instances of the way in which men of the country-squire type kept their daughters at home uneducated till they were beyond the age when they could take up a profession, and then left them to poverty. They did not even insure their lives for each child as we do now. Surely, Henry, it is obvious that women have done one thing admirably. The large reduction which they have effected in their own numbers has almost eliminated the superfluous, incompetent, unhappy women who found it so difficult to obtain a livelihood a hundred years ago, and has replaced them by an extra million competent, educated, fairly contented men who are all necessary to the State, who are encouraged, almost forced into various professions.

HENRY. Not contented, Eugenia.

EUGENIA. More contented, because actively employed, than if they were wandering aimlessly in the country lanes of their fathers' estates as thousands of intelligent uneducated women were doing a hundred years ago, kept ferociously at home by the will of the parent who held the purse-strings.

HENRY. I rather wish I had lived in those good old times, when the lanes were full of pretty women.

EUGENIA. But you, at any rate, Henry, had a large choice. I was much afraid at one time that you would never ask me.

HENRY. Ah! But then I was a great heir, and all heirs have a wide choice. Not that I had any choice at all. I had the good luck to be accepted by the only woman I ever cared a pin about, and the only one I was sure was disinterested.

EUGENIA. Dearest!

HENRY [_tentatively_]. And yet our marriage falls short of an ideal one, my Eugenia.

EUGENIA [_apologetically_]. Dear Henry, I know it does, but as soon as I cease to be Prime Minister I will do my duty to the country, and, what I think much more of, by you. What is a home without children?

Besides, I must set an example. When you came in I was framing a bill to meet the alarming decline of the birth-rate. Unless something is done the nation will become extinct. The results of this tendency among women to marry later and later are disastrous.

HENRY. And what is your bill, Eugenia?

EUGENIA. That every healthy married woman or female celibate over twenty-five and under forty, members of the government excepted, must do her duty to the State by bringing into the world--

HENRY. Celibate! Bringing into the world! Eugenia! and I thought the sanct.i.ty of marriage and home life were among your deepest convictions. Just think how you have upheld them to--_men_.

EUGENIA. Patriotism must come first. By bringing into the world three children, a girl and two boys. If her income is insufficient to rear them, the State will take charge of them. One extra boy is needed to supply the wastage of accidents in practical work, and in case of war. I shall stand or fall by this bill, for unless the women of England can be aroused to do their duty--unless there is general conscription to motherhood, as in Germany, England will certainly become a second-cla.s.s power.

HENRY. Perhaps when there are two men to every woman we shall be strong enough to force women to do justice to us.

EUGENIA. Men never did justice to us when they had the upper hand.

HENRY. They did not. And I think the truth lies there. Those who have the upper hand cannot be just to those who are in their power. They don't intend to be unfair, but they seem unable to give their attention to the rights of those who cannot enforce them. Men were unintentionally unjust to women for hundreds of years. They kept them down. Now women are unjust to us. Yes, Eugenia, you are. You keep us down. It seems to be an inevitable part of the _role_ of "top dog," and perhaps it is no use discussing it. If you don't want your plane, would you mind if I borrow it? I promised to meet Carlyon at four above the Florence Nightingale column in Anne Hyde's park, and it is nearly four now.

EUGENIA. Good-bye, Henry. Do take my plane. And I trust there will be no more doubt in your dear head as to your Presidency of the Anti-Suffrage League.

HENRY. None. I realise these wrigglings of the under dog are unseemly, and only disturb the equanimity and good-will of the "top dog."

Good-bye, Eugenia.

The End of the Dream

The first time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks, governesses, caretakers and charwomen.

Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering why she had chosen him--she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned--from her, never from him--the distress and anxiety from which he had released her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.

Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him, which she did.

"She is a cut above me, Essie is," he used to say rubbing his hands, and looking at her with joyful pride. It was true. Essie looked among us like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the sleepless suspicion of the great middle cla.s.s to which Ted and I belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a simple, humble, and rather timid creature.

I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by a large dog.

He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without imagination.

Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen socks himself.

He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her, though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to become so.

Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don't think she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always find adorable.

I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the balcony, pushing aside all Essie's tubs of flowering tulips to make room for a dreadful striped hammock.

"The thing I can't understand about you English women," said the visitor to Essie, "is why you treat your men as if they were household pets."

"What an excellent description of an English husband," said Essie.

"That is just what he is."