Here are Ladies. James Stephens

lay in this direction, for they were reputed notable and tireless speakers to whom replies are not pressingly necessary. He looked upon his sweetheart as from a distance, and tried to reconstruct her recent conversations.—He was amazed at the little he could remember. "I, I, I, we, we, we, this shop, that shop, Aunt Elsa, and chocolates." She had mentioned all these things on the previous day, but she did not seem to have said anything memorable about them, and, so far as he could recollect, he had said nothing in reply but "Oh, yes" and "To be sure!" Could he sustain a lifetime of small-talk on these meagre responses? He saw in vision his most miserable tea-table—a timid husband and a mad wife glaring down their noses at plates. The picture leaped at him as from a cinematograph and appalled him. … After a time they would not even dare to look at each other. Hatred would crouch behind these figures, waiting for its chain to be loosed!

      So he came to the knowledge that he, so soon to be a husband, had been specially fashioned by nature to be a bachelor. For him safety lay in solitude: others, less rigorously planned, might safely venture into the haphazard, gregarious state of wedlock, but he not only could not, but must not, do so, and he meditated an appeal to his bride to release him from the contract. Several times the meditation almost became audible, but always, just as he toppled on the surge of speech, the dear lady loosed a torrent of irrelevancies which swirled him from all anchorage, and left him at the last stranded so distantly from his thought that he did not know how to find his way back to it.

      It would be too brutally direct to shatter information about silk at one shilling the yard with a prayer for matrimonial freedom. The girl would be shocked—he could see her—she would stare at him, and suddenly grow red in the face and stammer; and he would be forced to trail through a lengthy, precise explanation of this matter which was not at all precise to himself. Furthermore, certain obscure emotions rendered him unwilling to be sundered from this girl.—There was the touch of her hand; more, the touch of her lips given bravely and with ready modesty—a contact not lightly to be relinquished. He did not believe he could ever weary of looking at her eyes: they were grey, widely open, and of a kindness such as he could not disbelieve in; a radiant cordiality, a soft, limpid goodwill; believing and trustful eyes which held no guile when they looked at him: there were her movements, her swiftness, spaciousness, her buoyant certainty: one remembered her hair, her hands, the way she wore a frock, and a strange, seductive something about the look of her shoe.

      The thing was not possible! It is the last and darkest insult to tell the woman who loves you that you do not wish to marry her. Her indignant curiosity may be appeased only by the excuse that you like some other woman better, and although she may hate the explanation she will understand it—but no less legitimate excuse than this may pass sunderingly between a man and a woman.

      It lay, therefore, that he must amend his own hand, and, accordingly, for the purpose of marital intercourse, he began a sad inquiry into the nature of things. The world was so full of things: clouds and winds and sewing machines, kings and brigands, hats and heads, flower-pots, jam and public-houses—surely one could find a little to chat about at any moment if one were not ambitiously particular. With inanimate objects one could speak of shape and colour and usefulness. Animate objects had, beside these, movements and aptitudes for eating and drinking, playing and quarrelling. Artistic things were well or badly executed, and were also capable of an inter-comparison which could not but be interesting and lengthy.—These things could all be talked about. There were positive and negative qualities attaching to everything, and when the former was exhausted the latter could still be profitably mined—"Order," said he, "subsists in everything, and even conversation must be subject to laws capable of ascertainment."

      He carefully, and under the terms of badinage, approached other men, inquiring how they bore themselves in the matrimonial dispute, and what were the subjects usually spoken of in the intimacies of family life. But from these people he received the smallest assistance.—Some were ribald, some jocose, some so darkly explanatory that intelligence could not peer through the mist or could only divine that these hated their wives. One man held that all domestic matters should be left entirely to the wife and that talking was a domestic matter. Another said that the words "yes, no, and why" would safeguard a man through any labyrinth, however tortuous. Another said that he always went out when the wife began to speak; and yet another suggested that the only possible basis for conversation was that of perpetual opposition, where an affirmation was always countered by a denial, and the proving of the case exercised both time and intelligence.

      As he sat in the train beside his wife the silence which he so dreaded came upon them. Emptiness buzzed in his head. He sought diligently for something to speak about—the characteristics of objects! There were objects and to spare, but he could not say—"that window is square, it is made of glass," or, "the roof of this carriage is flat, it is made of wood."

      Suddenly his wife buried her face in her muff, and her shoulders were convulsed. …

      Love and contrition possessed him on the instant. He eased his husky throat, and the dreaded, interminable conversation began—

      "What are you crying for, my dear?" said he.

      Her voice, smothered by the fur, replied—

      "I am not crying, darling," said she, "I am only laughing."

      III

      He got stiffly up from his seat before the fire—

      "Be hanged," said he, "if I wait any longer for her. If she doesn't please to come in before this hour let her stop out." He stared into the fire for a few moments—"Let her go to Jericho," said he, and he tramped up to bed.

      They had been married just six months, after, as he put it, the hardest courtship a man ever undertook. She was more like a piece of quicksilver than a girl. She was as uncertain as a spring wind, as flighty as a ball of thistledown—"Doesn't know her own mind for ten minutes together," he groaned. "Hasn't any mind at all," he'd think an hour later. While, on the following day, it might be—"That woman is too deep, she is dodging all round me, she is sticking her finger in my eye. She treats me as if I wasn't there at one moment, and diddles me as if I was Tom Fool the next—I'll get out of it."

      He had got out of it three or four times—halted her against a wall, and, with a furious forefinger, wagged all her misdeeds in her face; then, rating her up, down and round, he had prepared to march away complacent and refreshed like Justice taking leave of a sinner, only to find that if the jade wept he could not go away—

      "Dash it all," said he, "you can't leave a girl squatting down against a wall, with her head in her lap and she crying. Hang it," said he, "you feel as if there was water round your legs and you'll splash if you move."

      So he leavened justice with mercy, and, having dried her tears with his lips, he found himself in the same position as before, with a mad suspicion tattering through his brain that maybe he had been "diddled" again.

      But he married her, and to do that was a job also. She shied at matrimony. She shied at everything that looked plain or straight. She was like a young dog out for a walk: when she met a side-street she bolted down it and was instantly surrounded by adventure and misery, returning, like the recovered pup, thick with the mud of those excursions. There was a lust in her blood for side-streets, laneways and corners.

      "Marriage!" said she, and she was woebegone—"Marriage will be for ever."

      "So will heaven," he retorted comfortingly.

      "So will—the other place," said she, with a giggle, and crushed him under the feeling that she envisaged him as the devil of that particular Hades, instead of as an unfortunate sinner plucked up by the heels and soused into the stew-pan by his wife.

      He addressed himself—

      "When we are married," said he, "I'll keep a hand on you, my lady, that you won't be able to wriggle away from. If you are slippery, and faith you are, why I'm tough, and so you'll find it." "Get rid of your kinks before you marry," said he. "I've no use for a wife with one eye on me, and it a dubious one, and the other one squinting into a parlour two streets off. You've got to settle down and quit tricks. A wife has no one else to deceive