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Judgment of Eve

<h2>42IV</h2> No fowler spreads his snares in sight of those innocent birds that perch on the tree of life in paradise. As Arthur’s soul (it was a vain soul) preened its wings before her, Aggie never inquired whether the brilliance of its plumage was its own, or merely common to all feathered things in the pairing season. Young Arthur’s soul was like a lark, singing in heaven its delirious nuptial hymn. Aggie sat snug in her nest and marvelled at her mate, at the mounting of his wings, the splendid and untiring ardors of his song. Nor was she alarmed 43at his remarkable disappearance into the empyrean. Lost to sight he might be, but she could count on his swift, inevitable descent into the nest. The nest itself was the most wonderful nest a bird ever sat in. The two were so enthusiastic over everything that they delighted even in that dreadful, creaking, yellow villa. Its very vices entertained them. When it creaked they sat still and looked at each other, waiting for it to do it again. No other house ever possessed such ungovernable and mysterious spontaneities of sound. It was sometimes, they said, as if the villa were alive. And when all the wood-work shrank, and the winter winds streamed through their sitting-room, Aggie said nothing but put sand-bags in the window and covered them with art serge. 44Her mother declared that she had never stayed in a more inconvenient house; but Aggie wouldn’t hear a word against it. It was the house that Arthur had chosen. She was sorry, she said, if her mother didn’t like it. Mrs. Purcell was sorry, too, because she could not honestly say that, in the circumstances, she enjoyed a visit to Aggie and her husband. They made her quite uncomfortable, the pair of them. Their ceaseless activities and enthusiasms bewildered her. She didn’t care a rap about the lectures, and thought they were mad to go traipsing all the way to Hampstead to harangue about things they could have discussed just as well—now, couldn’t they?—at home. Aggie, she said, would become completely undomesticated. Mrs. Purcell was never pressed to stay longer than 45a week. They had no further need of her, those two sublime young egoists, fused by their fervors into one egoist, sublimer still. Mrs. Purcell was a sad hinderance to the intellectual life, and they were glad when she was gone. Heavens, how they kept it up! All through the winter evenings, when they were not going to lectures, they were reading Browning aloud to each other. For pure love of it, for its own sake, they said. But did Aggie tire on that high way, she kept it up for Arthur’s sake; did Arthur flag, he kept it up for hers. Then, in the spring, there came a time when Aggie couldn’t go to lectures any more. Arthur went, and brought her back the gist of them, lest she should feel herself utterly cut off. The intellectual life had, even for him, become something of a struggle. 46But, tired as he sometimes was, she made him go, sending, as it were, her knight into the battle. “Because now,” she said, “we shall have to keep it up more than ever. For them, you know.” <h2>47V</h2> <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> “‘I saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea, And it was full of pretty things for Baby and for me.’” </div> </div> Aggie always sang that song the same way. When she sang “for Baby” she gave the baby a little squeeze that made him laugh; when she sang “for me” she gave Arthur a little look that made him smile. <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> “‘There were raisins in the cabin, sugared kisses in the hold.’” </div> </div> Here the baby was kissed crescendo, prestissimo, till he laughed more than ever. <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> 48“‘The sails were made of silver and the masts were made of gold. The captain was a duck, and he cried—’” </div> </div> “Quack, quack!” said Arthur. It was Daddy’s part in the great play, and it made the baby nearly choke with laughter. <div class="illo" id="illo_4"> <ANTIMG src="images/illo_4.jpg" width-obs="421" height-obs="548" alt="A man and a woman play with a baby." /> “‘Quack, quack!’ said Arthur, and it made the baby nearly choke with laughter” </div> Arthur was on the floor, in a posture of solemn adoration somewhat out of keeping with his utterances. “Oh, Baby!” cried Aggie, “what times we’ll have when Daddy’s ship comes home!” The intellectual life had lapsed; but only for a period. Not for a moment could they contemplate its entire extinction. It was to be resumed with imperishable energy later on; they had pledged themselves to that. Meanwhile they had got beyond the stage when Aggie would call to her husband a dozen times a day: 49“Oh, Arthur, look! If you poke him in the cheek like that, he’ll smile.” And Arthur would poke him in the cheek, very gently, and say: “Why, I never! What a rum little beggar he is! He’s got some tremendous joke against us, you bet.” And a dialogue like this would follow: “Oh, Arthur, look, look, look, at his little feet!” “I say—do you think you ought to squeeze him like that?” “Oh, he doesn’t mind. He likes it. Doesn’t he? My beauty—my bird!” “He’ll have blue eyes, Aggie.” “No, they’ll change; they always do. And his nose is just like yours.” “I only wish I had his head of hair.” It was a terrible day for Arthur when the baby’s head of hair began to come off, till Aggie told him it always did that, and it would grow again. 50To-day they were celebrating the first birthday of the little son. At supper that night a solemn thought came to Aggie. “Oh, Arthur, only think. On Arty’s birthday” (they had been practising calling him “Arty” for the last fortnight) “he won’t be a baby any more.” “Never mind; Arty’s little sister will be having her first birthday very soon after.” Aggie blushed for pure joy, and smiled. She hadn’t thought of that. But how sad it would be for poor baby not to be the baby any more! Arthur gave an anxious glance at Aggie in her evening blouse. His mind was not set so high but what he liked to see his pretty wife wearing pretty gowns. And some of the money that was to have gone to the buying 51of books had passed over to the gay drapers of Camden Town and Holloway. “You know what it means, dear? We shall have to live more carefully.” “Oh yes, of course I know that.” “Do you mind?” “Mind?” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she gave a sad, foreboding glance at the well-appointed supper-table, where coffee and mutton-chops had succeeded cocoa. For Arthur had had a rise of salary that year; and if Aggie had a weakness, it was that she loved to get him plenty of nice, nourishing things to eat. “We sha’n’t be able to have quite so many nice things for supper. Shall you mind?” “Of course I sha’n’t. Do you take me for a pig?” said Arthur, gayly. 52He hadn’t thought of it in that light. Wasn’t he always saying that it was the immaterial that mattered? But it had just come over him that pretty Aggie wouldn’t have so many pretty clothes to wear, because, of course, whatever money they could save must go to the buying of books and the maintenance of the intellectual life. For the home atmosphere was to be part of the children’s education. “We will have lots of nice things,” said Aggie, “won’t we, when Daddy’s ship comes home?” <h2>53VI</h2> Daddy’s ship never did come home. “Quack, quack!” said Aggie, and three shrill voices echoed her. Aggie had to be the duck herself now; for Daddy had long ago given up his part in the spirited drama. They had been married six years, and Aggie had had six children. There was Arty and Catty and Willie and Dick and Emmy (the baby of the year); and a memory like a sword in her mother’s heart, which was all that was left of little Barbara, who had come after Catty. 54It seemed as if there was not much left of Aggie, either. Her delicate individuality had shown signs of perishing as the babies came, and the faster it perished the faster they took its place. At each coming there went some part of pretty Aggie’s prettiness; first the rose from her cheeks, then the gold from her hair, till none of her radiance was left but the blue light of her eyes, and that was fainter. Then, after Barbara’s death, her strength went, too; and now, at the end of the day she was too tired to do anything but lie on the sofa and let the children crawl all over her, moaning sometimes when they trampled deep. Then Arthur would stir in his arm-chair and look irritably at her. He still loved Aggie and the children, but not their noises. The evenings, once prolonged by 55gas-light and enthusiasm to a glorious life, had shrank to a two hours’ sitting after supper. They never went anywhere now. Picture-galleries and concert-halls knew them no more. The Debating Society at Hampstead had long ago missed the faithful, inseparable pair—the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed, after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane. Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel’s trump had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused him from his apathy. And as they never went to see anybody, nobody ever came to see them. The Hampstead ladies found Aggie dull and her conversation monotonous. 56It was all about Arthur and the babies; and those ladies cared little for Arthur, and for the babies less. Of Aggie’s past enthusiasm they said that it was nothing but a pose. Time had revealed her, the sunken soul of patience and of pathos, the beast of burden, the sad-eyed, slow, and gray. The spirit of the place, too, had departed, leaving a decomposing and discolored shell. The beloved yellow villa had disclosed the worst side of its nature. The brown wall-paper had peeled and blistered, like an unwholesome skin. The art serge had faded; the drugget was dropping to pieces, worn with many feet; the wood-work had shrunk more than ever, and draughts, keen as knives, cut through the rooms and passages. The “Hope” and the “Love Leading Life” and the “Love Triumphant,” 57like imperishable frescos in a decaying sanctuary, were pitiful survivals, testifying to the death of dreams. Saddest of all, the bookshelves, that were to have shot up to the ceiling, had remained three feet from the floor, showing the abrupt arrest of the intellectual life. It was evident that they hadn’t kept it up. If anything, Arthur was more effaced, more obliterated, than his wife. He, whose appearance had once suggested a remarkable personality, a poet or a thinker, now looked what he had become, a depressed and harassed city clerk, no more. His face was dragged by deep downward lines that accentuated its weakness. A thin wisp of colorless mustache sheltered, without concealing, the irritability of his mouth. Under his high, sallow 58forehead, his eyes, once so spiritual, looked out on his surroundings with more indifference than discontent. His soul fretted him no longer; it had passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness. Only the sounds made by his wife and children had power to agitate him. He was agitated now. “That will do,” he said, looking up from the magazine he was trying to read, not because it interested him in the least, but because it helped to keep the noises out. But the children were clamoring for an encore. “Again, again!” they cried. “Oh Mummy, do do it again!” “Hsh-sh-sh. Daddy’s reading.” And Aggie drew the children closer to her, and went on with the rhyme in her sad, weak whisper. “If you must read aloud to them, 59for goodness’ sake speak up and have done with it. I can’t stand that whispering.” Aggie put down the picture-book, and Arty seized one half and Catty the other, and they tugged, till Catty let go and hit Arty, and Arty hit Catty back again, and Catty howled. “Can’t you keep those children quiet?” “Oh, Arty, shame! to hurt your little sister!” At that Arty howled louder than Catty. Arthur sat up in his chair. “Leave the room, sir! Clear out this instant!” His weak face looked weaker in its inappropriate assumption of command. “Do you hear what I say, sir?” Arty stopped crying, and steadied his quivering infant mouth till it 60expressed his invincible determination. “I’ll g-g-g-go for Mommy. But I w-w-w-won’t go for Daddy. I doesh’n’t ‘ike him.” “Hsh-sh—poor Daddy—he’s so tired. Run away to the nursery, darlings, all of you.” “I can’t think why on earth you have them down here at this time,” said their father, as the door slammed behind the last retreating child. “My dear, you said yourself it’s the only time you have for seeing them. I’m sure you don’t get much of them.” “I get a great deal too much sometimes.” “If we only had a big place for them to run about in—” “What’s the use of talking about things we haven’t got, and never shall have? Is supper ready?” 61She raised herself heavily from her sofa, and went to see, trailing an old shawl after her. Arthur, by way of being useful, put his foot upon the shawl as it went by. After supper he felt decidedly better, and was inclined to talk. “I met Davidson this morning in the city. He said his wife hadn’t seen you for an age. Why don’t you go and look her up?” Aggie was silent. “You can’t expect her to be always running after you.” “I can’t run after her, I assure you. I haven’t the strength.” “You used,” he said, reproachfully, “to be strong enough.” Aggie’s mouth twisted into a blanched, unhappy smile—a smile born of wisdom and of patience and of pain. 62“My dear, you don’t know what it is to have had six children.” “Oh, don’t I? I know enough not to want any more of them.” “Well—then—” said Aggie. But Arthur’s eyes evaded her imploring and pathetic gaze. He turned the subject back to Mrs. Davidson—a clumsy shift. “Anyhow, it doesn’t take much strength to call on Mrs. Davidson, does it?” “It’s no good. I can’t think of anything to say to her.” “Oh, come, she isn’t difficult to get on with.” “No, but I am. I don’t know why it is I always feel so stupid now.” “That,” said Arthur, “is because you haven’t kept it up.” “I haven’t had the time,” she wailed. 63“Time? Oh, rubbish, you should make time. It doesn’t do to let things go like that. Think of the children.” “It’s because I’m always thinking of them.” They rose from their poor repast. (Coffee and mutton-chops had vanished from the board, and another period of cocoa had set in.) He picked up her shawl, that had dropped again, and placed it about her shoulders, and they dragged themselves mournfully back into their sitting-room. She took up her place on the sofa. He dropped into the arm-chair, where he sat motionless, looking dully at the fire. His wife watched him with her faded, tender eyes. “Arthur,” she said, suddenly, “it’s the first meeting of the Society to-night. Did you forget?” They had 64never admitted, to themselves or to each other, that they had given it up. “Yes,” said Arthur, peevishly, “of course I forgot. How on earth did you expect me to remember?” “I think you ought to go, dear, sometimes. You never went all last winter.” “I know.” “Isn’t it a pity not to try—a little—just to keep it up? If it’s only for the children’s sake.” “My dear Aggie, it’s for the children’s sake—and yours—that I fag my brain out, as it is. When you’ve been as hard at it as I’ve been, all day, you don’t feel so very like turning out again—not for that sort of intellectual game. You say you feel stupid in the afternoon. What do you suppose I feel like in the evening?” 65His accents cut Aggie to the heart. “Oh, my dear, I know. I only thought it might do you good, sometimes, to get a change—if it’s only from me and my stupidity.” “If there’s one thing I hate more than another,” said Arthur, “it is a change.” She knew it. That had been her consolation. Arthur was not as the race of dreamers to which he once seemed to have belonged. There was in him a dumb, undying fidelity to the tried and chosen. From the first, before his apathy came on him, he had hardly ever left her to an evening by herself. He had had neither eyes nor ears nor voice for any other woman. And though her face had become the face of another woman, and he hated changes, she knew that it had never changed for him. He loved her more 66than any of the six children she had borne him. “After all,” said Aggie, “do you think it really matters?” “Do I think what matters?” “What we’ve lost.” He looked suspiciously at her, his heavy brain stirred by some foreboding of uncomfortable suggestion; she had been thinking of Barbara, perhaps. “I don’t know what you mean.” He didn’t. The flame in the woman’s heart was not wholly dead, because he had kindled it, and it was one with her love of him. The dream they had dreamed together had lived on for her; first, as an agony, then as a regret. But the man had passed over into the sensual darkness that is seldom pierced by pain. Of the pleasures that had once borne him, buoyant 67and triumphant, on the crest of the wave, none were left but such sad earthly wreckage as life flings up at the ebbing of the spiritual tide. They had come to the dark shores, where, if the captain wavers, the ships of dream founder with all their freight. A dull light was already kindling under his tired eyelids. “I don’t know what you feel like,” said he, “but I’ve had enough sitting-up for one night. Don’t you think you’d better go to bed?” She went, obediently. <h2>68VII</h2> A year passed. It was winter again, and the Gattys had had sickness in their house. Aggie had been ailing ever since the birth of the baby that had succeeded Emmy. And one evening the doctor had to be summoned for little Willie, who had croup. Willie, not four years old, was the last baby but three. Yes, he was only a baby himself; Aggie realized it with anguish, as she undressed him and he lay convulsed on her lap. He was only a baby; and she had left him to run about with Arty and Catty as if he were a big boy. She 69should have taken more care of Willie. But the gods took care of Willie, and he was better before the doctor could arrive; and Aggie got all the credit of his cure. Aggie couldn’t believe it. She was convinced the doctor was keeping something from her, he sat so long with Arthur in the dining-room. She could hear their voices booming up the chimney as she mended the fire in the nursery overhead. It was not, she argued, as if he ever cared to talk to Arthur. Nobody ever cared to talk to Arthur long, nor did he care to talk to anybody. So, when the clock struck seven (the doctor’s dinner-hour), and the dining-room door never opened, Aggie’s anxiety became terror, and she stole down-stairs. She had meant to 70go boldly in, and not stand there listening; but she caught one emphatic word that arrested her, and held her there, intent, afraid of her own terror. “Never!” She could hear Arthur’s weak voice sharpened to a falsetto, as if he, too, were terrified. “No, never. Never any more!” There was a note almost of judgment in the doctor’s voice; but Aggie could not hear that, for the wild cry that went up in her heart. “Oh, never what? Is Willie—my Willie—never to be well any more!” Then she listened without a scruple, justified by her motherhood. They were keeping things from her, as they had kept them before. As they had kept them when little Barbara sickened. <div class="illo" id="illo_5"> <ANTIMG src="images/illo_5.jpg" width-obs="332" height-obs="574" alt="A woman stands outside of a closed door." /> “She listened without a scruple, justified by her motherhood” </div> “And if—if—” Arthur’s voice was 71weaker this time; it had a sort of moral powerlessness in it; but Aggie’s straining ears caught the “if.” “There mustn’t be any ‘ifs.’” Aggie’s heart struggled in the clutches of her fright. “That’s not what I mean. I mean—is there any danger now?” “From what I can gather so far, I should say—none.” Aggie’s heart gave a great bound of recovery. “But if,” the doctor went on, “as you say—” “I know” cried Arthur, “you needn’t say it. You won’t answer for the consequences?” “I won’t. For the consequences, a woman—in the weak state your wife is in—may answer herself—with her life.” Aggie was immensely relieved. So 72they were only talking about her all the time! That night her husband told her that her release had come. It had been ordained that she was to rest for two years. And she was to have help. They must have a girl. “Arthur,” she said, firmly, “I won’t have a girl. They’re worse than charwomen. They eat more; and we can’t afford it.” “We must afford it. And oh, another thing—Have you ever thought of the children’s education?” Thought of it? She had thought of nothing else, lying awake at night, waiting for the baby’s cry; sitting in the daytime, stitching at the small garments that were always just too small. “Of course,” she said, submissively. She was willing to yield the glory of the idea to him. 73“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to manage it. One thing I do know—there mustn’t be any more of them. I can’t afford it.” He had said that before so often that Aggie had felt inclined to tell him that she couldn’t afford it, either. But to-night she was silent, for he didn’t know she knew. And as she saw that he (who did know) was trying to spare her, she blessed him in her heart. If he did not tell her everything that the doctor had said, he told her that Willie was all right. Willie had been declared to be a child of powerful health. They weren’t to coddle him. As if any one had coddled him! Poor Aggie only wished she had the time. But now that her release had come, she would have time, and strength, too, for many things that she had had 74to leave undone. She would get nearer to her children, and to her husband, too. Even at four o’clock in the morning, Aggie had joy in spite of her mortal weariness, as she rocked the sleepless baby on the sad breast that had never suckled him. She told the baby all about it, because she couldn’t keep it in. “My beauty,” she murmured, “he will always be my baby. He sha’n’t have any little brothers or sisters, never any more. There—there—there, did they—? Hsh-sh-sh, my sweet pet, my lamb. My little king—he shall never be dethroned. Hush, hush, my treasure, or he’ll wake his poor Daddy, he will.” In another room, on his sleepless pillow, the baby’s father turned and groaned. All the next day, and the next, 75Aggie went about with a light step, and with eyes that brightened like a bride’s, because of the spring of new love in her heart. It came over her now how right Arthur had been, how she ought to have kept it up, and how fearfully she had let it go. Not only the lectures—what did they matter?—but her reading, her music, everything, all the little arts and refinements by which she had once captured Arthur’s heart—“Things,” she said, “that made all the difference to Arthur.” How forbearing and constant he had been! That evening she dressed her hair and put flowers on the supper-table. Arthur opened his eyes at the unusual appearance, but said nothing. She could see that he was cross about something—something that had occurred 76in the office, probably. She had never grudged him his outbursts of irritability. It was his only dissipation. Aggie had always congratulated herself on being married to a good man. Coffee, the beloved luxury they had so long renounced, was served with that supper. But neither of them drank it. Arthur said he wasn’t going to be kept awake two nights running, and after that, Aggie’s heart was too sore to eat or drink anything. He commented bitterly on the waste. He said he wondered how on earth they were going to pay the doctor’s bills, at that rate. Aggie pondered. He had lain awake all night thinking of the doctor’s bills, had he? And yet that was just what they were to have no more of. Anyhow, he had been kept awake; and, 77of course, that was enough to make him irritable. So Aggie thought she would soothe him to sleep. She remembered how he used to go to sleep sometimes in the evenings when she played. And the music, she reflected with her bitterness, would cost nothing. But music, good music, costs more than anything; and Arthur was fastidious. Aggie’s fingers had grown stiff, and their touch had lost its tenderness. Of their old tricks they remembered nothing, except to stumble at a “stretchy” chord, a perfect bullfinch of a chord, bristling with “accidentals,” where in their youth they had been apt to shy. Arthur groaned. “Oh, Lord, there won’t be a wink of sleep for either of us if you wake that brat again. What on earth possesses you to strum?” 78But Aggie was bent, just for the old love of it, and for a little obstinacy, on conquering that chord. “Oh, stop it!” he cried. “Can’t you find something better to do?” “Yes,” said Aggie, trying to keep her mouth from working, “perhaps I could find something.” Arthur looked up at her from under his eyebrows, and was ashamed. She thought still of what she could do for him; and an inspiration came. He had always loved to listen to her reading. Her voice had not suffered as her fingers had; and there, in its old place on the shelf, was the Browning he had given her. “Would you like me to read to you?” “Yes,” he said, “if you’re not too tired.” He was touched by the face he had seen, and by her pathetic efforts; 79but oh, he thought, if she would only understand. She seated herself in the old place opposite him, and read from where the book fell open of its own accord. <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> “‘O, lyric Love, half angel and half bird’”— </div> </div> Her voice came stammering like a child’s, choked with tenderness and many memories— <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> “‘And all a wonder and a wild desire—’” </div> </div> “Oh no, I say, for Heaven’s sake, Aggie, not that rot.” “You—you used to like it.” “Oh, I dare say, years ago. I can’t stand it now.” “Can’t stand it?” Again he was softened. “Can’t understand it, perhaps, my dear. But it comes to the same thing.” 80“Yes,” said Aggie, “it comes to the same thing.” And she read no more. For the first time, for many years, she understood him. That night, as they parted, he did not draw her to him and kiss her; but he let her tired head lean towards him, and stroked her hair. Her eyes filled with tears. She laid her forehead on his shoulder. “Poor Aggie,” he said, “poor little woman.” She lifted her head suddenly. “It’s poor you,” she whispered, “poor, poor dear.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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