Confessions of a Wife/Chapter 3

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Confessions of a Wife
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

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4637676Confessions of a Wife — Chapter IIIElizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

III

November the third.

There is no doubt about it that happiness is an occupation. When I see how long it is since I have added anything worth adding to the Accepted Manuscript, and when I try to define to myself what it is that gives me such a sense of being busy all the time, I find that it is scarcely more than the existence of joy. What I have lost is the leisure of loneliness; what I have gained is the avocation of love.

They teach us that only in heaven can we expect to know happiness. It is not true! I summon mine—a singing witness in the courts of life. I fling down the glove of joy, a challenge to such dismal doctrine. There are whole weeks when I live in poems, I breathe in song. There are entire days when I float in color, and seem to be set free in space, as a bird is, knowing the earth and loving it, but citizen of the skies and homing to them. I fall asleep as if I were a sunset, and I wake as if I were a sunrise, so near am I to Nature, so much a part of her beatitude. Nature is joy—I perceive that now. I used to think she was duty. How wonderful it is to live in harmony with her, out of sheer joyousness—not conscript, but volunteer within her mighty and beautiful forces!

I am always reading new chapters in the Story Without an End. Every day I turn a fresh page in the book of love. I did not think that it would be so absorbing. Really, it has plot. For, what is the plot of incident beside that of feeling? A tame affair, as thoroughly displaced as a piece of sensational fiction by the great drama of the gospels.

Dana and I have been reading the New Testament together on Sunday evenings. He said yesterday: "What a complete situation!" From a histrionic point of view he thinks the life of Christ the most tremendous and well-balanced plot ever conceived. He admitted that he had forgotten how fine it was.

"Morally fine, at least," I said.

"Morally fine, at most; spiritually, if you will," he answered. He spoke quite soberly for Dana. He is a very merry person; he laughs more easily and more often than I do. I am afraid, sometimes, he thinks me too strenuous. (He said so one day, but I felt so badly that he kissed the word savagely away.) He is not at all religious. Why does this make me feel as if I ought to become so? I have never thought much about the philosophy of Christianity—I mean as a practical matter that had anything in particular to do with myself—until lately.

"You are a sumptuous little pagan," he said to me Saturday. Now, this did not please me, as he seemed to expect. It left a little dust, like ashes of roses, in my heart. I feel as if I had failed him somewhere.

"I am afraid I am too happy to be religious," I said.

"Then stay irreligious!" he cried. The plea of his lips smothered that spark of sacred feeling; and against the argument of his arms I cannot reason.

How fearful is the philosophy of a kiss! When I think of poor girls—young, ignorant, all woman and all love—I never thought of them before except with a kind of bewildered horror.

I wonder—to anchor to my thought; see, even my thought casts off its moorings as well as my feeling; I seem to be adrift on all sides of my being—I wonder if it is in the nature of suffering to make people in so far divine as it is in that of joy to keep them altogether human. I begin to see that there is a conflict as old as the axis of the world. Around its fixed and invisible bar every soul of us revolves—so many revolutions to an ecstasy, so many to a pang; and the sum and nature of these revolutions is the sum and nature of ourselves. When I am old and sad, shall I turn penitent and think about heaven? Oh, I am young, I am glad, I am beloved, and I love! Earth is enough for me, for he is in it.

It would be impossible for me to put into words the quality of his consideration for me. It is something ineffable and not to be desecrated by expression. It is my atmosphere. His treatment of me is the very devoutness of love. I breathe a devotion for which any tender woman in the world would die. Though I am wife, thus am I goddess, for he deifies me.

But while his soul looks up to mine
My heart lies at his feet.

The difference is that now I am willing he should know when he has my heart at his feet. Once I kept the secret to myself, and confided it only to this dumb paper. There are some delicate lines in the poem when Radha and Krishna were married—the one that begins:

But when the music of her bangles passed the porch—

November the seventh.

Mrs. Gray talked to me a little last week. She said: "My dear, your mother kept your father at her feet. She held him there to the last breath. I tell you a secret, since she cannot. The happiest marriages are those where a wife loves her husband less than he loves her."

"How many such do you know?" I asked her, rather hotly, for my cheeks burned.

She gave me a keen look.

"You have more knowledge of the world than I supposed," she answered slowly, and I thought she sighed.

"Would you have a woman coquet with her husband?" I demanded. "Is marriage an intrigue or a sacrament? You don't know my husband!" I cried—proudly, I suppose, for I was touched a little.

"There, there! Never mind," said Mrs. Gray, as if I had been a pouting child. She began to talk about Robert Hazelton's wedding-present. It is a very odd present. Nobody quite understands it. It is just a gold candlestick made in the shape of a compass, with the candle set at one side as you see them, Dana says, on real compasses. Within is the needle, a black point upon a white enameled dial, pointing to the north. I cannot help liking it; it is so like Rob. Dana asked me if it were meant to convey the fidelity of superfluous affection, and I could not help laughing, it was so like Dana. Yet, when I had laughed, I was a little sorry. Robert has always thought me a much better woman than I am, poor fellow! Dana invited him to dinner once, but he went away early to see some patients. I believe he has an excellent practice. I wish he would marry Minnie Curtis.

I am writing somehow pettily this evening. I don't know why. My soul seems shriveled a little. Dana is dining out with some gentlemen: I believe it has something to do with politics. It is the first time. I would not have believed that I could be so ridiculous about it. I have devoted myself to Father the whole evening, but the more devoted I was the worse it grew.

It seemed to me all the while as if the sky were put out, and the earth had stopped, and Dana were dead. Then it seemed as if there never had been any Dana, and never would be or could be. Father was so pleased with having me to himself again that it was quite touching. He even called Job, and told him to stand on his head; and nothing could be more pathetic, for Father is not one of the dog people. He is polite to Job, for he recognizes that Job is a gentleman, too; but he has never loved him. On Job's part it is a wholly unrequited attachment. But for me, I could have cried all the evening. And Job would not stand on his head; he has forgotten how.

He is up here with me now, just as he used to be, quite by ourselves. Poor Job! He kisses me as if he had not seen me for six months—not obtrusively, but with a shy rapture of which no being but a dog is capable. He does not get used to sleeping in the bath-room, but Dana prefers to have him there. He says if we cannot have a home to ourselves, at least we can have our own rooms as he likes them, which is perfectly reasonable in Dana. I find he is always reasonable when he has his preferences consulted. I hope Job will overcome that air of settled melancholy which he wears whenever he regards my husband. It cannot be denied that he never "meets him with a smile." Sometimes I think this vexes Dana. I used to think he loved Job as much as I did.

Dana is very late. It is more than half-past ten. I admit I am rather tired of petting Job. This occupation does not seem as absorbing as it used to be. I cannot read,—I have tried, but I listen so that I understand nothing I read. I hear his footsteps on the concrete walk, past the electric light in the street, whose cool, fair light falls into our room and across it when the gas is out. (Dana likes that light as much as I do; it was a delight to me to find that he understands the way I have always felt about it.)

As I sit here alone I hear him and I hear him, but they are not his footsteps at all, only the footsteps of my heart. I have seen a picture of "Eurydice Listening," and her body was curved a little like an ear.

It is as if I had become an ear—heart and body; I seem to hear with my forehead and my hair. A lifelong invalid told me once that she heard with her cheeks.

It is eleven o'clock. Job barks in his dreams of the grasshoppers at Sanchester; he has distinctly a grasshopper bark. I know politics stay out late nights, but I did not know Dana meant to go into politics. He told me to go to sleep. Men say such singular things to women.

Job is asleep on my lounging-gown; I hate to move him. I did not have a new one, for I'm fond of this; but Maggie trimmed it up for me very daintily with yards of fresh chantilly. Dana likes me in this gown. He likes the lace, and he likes the color. He says it is the shade of my ruby. I think that must be Dana this time. . . .

It was a caller coming away from the Curtises'. Perhaps by the time I get into the gown, and get my hair brushed and braided, and warm my red slippers, and fix his candle and all his little things the way he likes, he will be here.

I have put fresh wood on the fire, for it is quite a cold night. The blaze springs, as if it laughed. Crossing before the pier-glass just now, I was half startled at the figure I saw there—tall, all that lace and velvet, and all that color, and curved a little, like Eurydice—bent so, just an ear.

I wonder if Orpheus was in politics?

The leaping fire flares upon my ruby; deep, deep, without a flaw, guardian and glad above my wedding-ring. I think a ruby has never been quite understood. I see now—of all the jewels God created one for women. A ruby is the heart of a wife.

Oh, there! After all! He is striding up the avenue. How he swings along! As if he had the world beneath his ringing feet.

I will not run down. I will make believe that I am asleep, or not pleased that he was out so late. And when he gets to the top of the stairs, and as far as the door—

"Dear Love: Was I cross with you to-day about your golf-stockings? Believe, I did not mean to be. I have had a hard headache, and the sore throat, ever since we went in town to the Grays' in the storm, and I wore the lace dress because you like it; but it was pretty thin. And I had darned the stockings myself,—I would not leave them to Maggie,—and I was so sure I had filled every single cavity! What a poor dentist I should make! See, I am trying to laugh. But, really, I have cried. It is the first time you have ever spoken so to me, Darling. No woman ever forgets the first time that the man she loves speaks sharply to her: of that I am sure. Everything else would go out of her consciousness first.

"I was so afraid I should cry on the spot, and that would have shamed me before you and to myself, for I don't like people to see me cry. And I think it was because I tried so hard not to cry that I 'answered back' a little.

"Dear, I am sorry. I was wrong. Forgive me, my own! Love never needs to answer back; it is too great to be so small. Silence would be the nobler way. It is, I think, the stronger weapon. But there need be no weapons, God be thanked! between yourself and

"Marna, your Wife.

"P.S. I have been all over them—the brown ones, and the green, and the gray, and the speckly kinds that are so hard to find the holes in; I
"I WAS HALF STARTLED AT THE FIGURE I SAW THERE." have worked over the whole pile for a long while, to be sure there are none of those tiny places the barbed-wire fence bites between the pattern. I hope you will not find me so careless and stupid again. I am not much used to mending stockings. Maggie has always done it for Father. But I will see to yours, if you wish me to; of course I will. One day you said so,—had you forgotten?—'Marna, I wish you would mend my clothes yourself. I have always thought how nice it would be to have my wife do such things for me.' So I tried. Dear, I am more than willing to please you about these little things. I care for nothing else but to please you. My heart leans to you all the time. Waking and sleeping I dream, and all my dreams are yours. All my being has become a student in the science of love; and all my art is to learn how skilfully to make you happy. Your frown is my exile. Your smile is my Eden. Your arms are my heaven. Once, ah, once I was—who could believe it now?—your Wilderness Girl. Now, your happy captive, I kiss my chains. Hold them lightly, Love, for I wear them so heavily! Yet lock them; I shall but love you more. Do you remember the day I told you to throw the key away?

"Oh, but you took me from my tribe, you Son of Battle! You hurled me over your shoulder and ran. Do you know how Father misses me, though we are in the very one selfsame house? You have torn me from him, from my own life, from myself. From a depth that you knew not, you drew me, and you slew me; for I tell you in a love like mine is a being slain. To a depth that I know not, you drag me. Ah, be merciful—I love you!—for love's sake!

"If ever the time should come when I could not pour out words like these upon you, if ever the day should dawn when I should be sorry that I had written so to you, or that I had suffered you so to see the beating of my heart, for indeed such words are but drops of my heart's blood—but I scorn myself for that unworthy 'if.' When thought moves without a brain, when blood leaps without a heart, when the moon forgets to swim on summer nights above the tree-house where my lips first drank your kiss, then may I be sorry that I have written as I write to-night to you.

"And I am sure you will never speak again as you did to-day. It was the first time, as it will be the last. I thought if I told you, if I showed you how it slays a woman, if just this once I should put by something in myself that stands guard over my nature and says, 'Do not let him know,' I thought that perhaps it would be worth while. You might, I can understand, you might hurt me, not knowing. Knowing that you did, I'll swear you never would, because you never could."

December the third.

Dana has gone into the law office of Mrs. Gray's brother, Mr. Mellenway—J. Harold. Mellenway. He is so busy that I see him only evenings, and not always then. I am trying to get used to it. Father says he is making a remarkable beginning in his profession, and that if he sustains his promise I shall have reason to be proud of him. Father repeats that he is a brilliant young man. Dana does not have much time to devote himself to Father now. He seems to be whirled along. We all seem to be whirled along like the figures in the Wheel of Life drawn by some ancient Oriental people,—I forget who,—all ignorant that they are helpless, and all hurled on to a blind fate.

"Stay by me when you come, Darling! Don't let them persuade you that it will harm me. It will save me, and it is the only thing that will. They thought that I should die, but I could not die when you were so far away. That would have been impossible.

Dana, Dana, I live, and I love you. For I am

"The Mother of your Child."

August the thirtieth.

This is the first time I have been allowed to write (to amuse myself), and I am limited to eight lines. "Being happy," I remember Hawthorne said, "he had no questions to put." Being happy because my husband gives me every moment that he can beg or steal from time, being happy because he is so happy, because he blinds me with tenderness, I have no letters to write. Instead, I record the fact that my daughter is two weeks old to-day, and that Job is so jealous of her that we cannot keep them in the same room. I think he is planning definite hostilities. Job finds her more objectionable than David and Dora.

Confessions of a Wife/Chapter 3

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