Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 2/The wife for me
THE WIFE FOR ME.
There are wives enough to be had. There are English, Parisian, Norman, and even Flemish, mothers clucking to fair broods of daughters. On all sides the maternal cluck! cluck! reminds me that when I may be in search of a wife, I shall not have very far to go.
I am sitting upon a pebbly shore on the coast of picturesque Normandy. I have been assisting at the opening of a splendid bathing establishment, which is to make our favourite Norman port not only an irresistible holiday place for the Parisians, but also a point for a friendly English invasion. I have breakfasted sumptuously with the mayor (who, let me add in confidence, is the builder of the bathing establishment in question); I have assisted at an opening ball; and I have had the proud satisfaction of drinking Lyons beer with the mayor’s adjoint. But worldly honours oppress my humble shoulders. I choose rather, on this day of savage heat, to pull my felt hat over my dazzled eyes, and mark the trim ladies, with their red and purple petticoats, pass (like animated fuchsia flowers perched upon patent leather styles) before my unworthy retina. My elbow rests upon good Dr. Brown’s Philosophy of the Mind, and I cry “Ah, me!” that I cannot drink deeper to-day of his generous doctrine. He has put me in a pleasant train of thought; he has warmed my heart; he was a good man, and I lift my hat to him. I wish that I had been one of his listeners some time ago in classic Edinburgh.
Lonely bachelor that I am! why should I read of “the ministry of tender courtesies?” There are my chambers, dull and dusty, some three hundred miles away from this, where my minister of tender courtesies charges me five shillings a week to light my fire and broil my matutinal bloater. These are tender courtesies I buy at a fixed price. I am away from my chambers now, and am saving my five shillings, so that even my largely-bonneted, be-pattened minister of courtesies—whose voice is the faint echo of that of a cabman in a fog—is estranged from me. And I am alone, while these human butterflies swim past me, with the heavy parental moth at their wing. A moth, by the way, must be a dowager butterfly.
Why did I open Dr. Brown’s bulky volume of philosophy at the eighty-eighth lecture, and read page after page about the “duties of affinity,” till I found myself in the virgin gold and speckless ivory halls of holy matrimony? More grateful to me is the sleet-bearing east wind than the waving of Love’s “purple wings.” Not in my chambers shall his “constant lamp” be lighted. I am alone in the world, and in proof of my determination to remain alone I have lately bought a patent bachelor’s-kitchen which would enable me to cook a chop, boil an egg, or turn out a cup of boiling coffee in two minutes—if I could only make it burn. Wicked eyes, tender eyes, mournful eyes, timid eyes, rest upon me by turns, passing me, as I rest my elbow upon the old doctor’s lecture on the duties of affinity. And I mark each goddess as she passes, dimpling the wet sand with her dainty high-heeled boots. Wicked-eyes carries two soiled volumes of the younger Dumas. I feel the old Scotch doctor trembling between his modest cloth covers at the scandal. Wicked-eyes is proud and confident, however, and she lights presently upon the soiled pages, in the shadow of a broken fishing-smack. The fingers, in faint yellow gloves, slender as maccaroni, that turn young Dumas’ page, would not, I am certain, set that light right in my patent bachelor-kitchen. A thimble would sit awkwardly on any of those saffron digits. Wicked-eyes has a mother, I see; a tall stately dame who hopes to pass for the sister of her child. But her foot-marks in the sand are not dainty; I see the autumn withering under the stolen buds of spring. A little, timid, homely man creeps up to mother and daughter. He is the busy working bee to the elderly queen and to the young queen; he is the creature who draws cheques, hands the queens out of their carriage, takes the obscure seat in the opera box, carries the parasols, is useful on board the Channel boat, and is begged not to talk about his business in his drawing-room. When Wicked-eyes was a child he looked after her, the servants, and the luggage, while the queen bee sailed into the state cabin. Wicked-eyes hopes that he will not invite any of his city friends to mamma’s next rout. I wonder whether the simple little man can recal the days when he sate down in his bachelor chambers as it pleased him; when he went and came freely, and when those homely sisters of his (who, according to his queen bee, “never could dress fit to be seen,”) paid him laughing visits to look over his stock of linen, and set anything right that had gone wrong.
Wicked-eyes would vote my philosophical doctor a bore and a vulgarian, with his notions about virtue and wisdom, before rank and money.
And Tender-eyes? Languidly and gracefully she reposes, while a younger sister holds an ombrelle over her head. Her mother is her slave. Her whims govern all people who come in contact with her. Special dainties are prepared for her refined and fastidious palate. A beefsteak suffices for Carry, her buxom sister; but Tender-eyes! delicate, tender Jacintha! can pick her food only from the breast of the plumpest of pigeons. Tender-eyes is said to be highly intellectual. She talks shilling manuals about ferns and shells, and primary and tertiary formations; she is great on the one primeval language, and can lisp Ruskinism on art; while her poor soft mother smiles, and bids laughing Carry fetch her sister a stool for her feet. My blood freezes with horror to think of Tender-eyes meeting me on a certain merry morning at church. Married to Tender-eyes—how should I get to the Central Criminal Court every morning at ten o’clock? She would require me to butter her toast—and she would insist upon a very thick layer of butter, I am certain. I should be sent to Mudie’s for the third volume of the Geologist’s Hammer; or, Knocks at the Gate of the Old World, by Professor Mantilla. I should find her at the Hammer in the afternoon when I returned to dinner, and she would suggest that I should take a chop at my club; in the evening, loaded with shawls, scent-bottles, pillows, and phials (having carefully locked up the grocery), I should be called upon to assist her to the nuptial chamber. My briefs would never keep pace with my poulterer’s bills. I should be crushed under the weight of cooling grapes at half-a-guinea per pound. I should be dunned by the livery-stable keeper, and consigned to the Bench by the chemist. Fair Malade Imaginaire, I can afford only plain roast and boiled, with a chicken on Sundays, when my good mother honours me with a visit; so that in mercy to you I turn my back and leave you till there passes a pocket that can stand daily game and truffles, a chariot for the park, and yearly hundreds for the German waters. I am of the luckless band who have to talk and study for my guineas—of that vulgar crew whose mean aspiration to keep house on five hundred a-year lately filled the columns of the Times.
In the dingy brown dress—in incomprehensible bonnet—her feet cased in boots large enough to be portmanteaus—wearing dim thread gloves, sits Mournful-eyes. Wicked-eyes had frightened me: I had turned from Tender-eyes: here then assuredly was my goddess. Elizabeth Fry herself would not have called her a flirt: friend Martha of Peckham (a rigid little Quakeress of my acquaintance,) could not have found fault with her homely gown and bonnet. She was as sedate as any feminine secretary to a suburban Bible Society could be. She is reading Bohn’s edition of Jeremy Taylor—pencil in hand. Every now and then she dips the pencil between her lips, then marks a passage. Do I sigh that I am not that pencil? Do I sigh to be the paw in the torpid northern bear’s mouth? Mournful-eyes has a voice that neither rises nor falls. She has discovered—precocious little Christian!—that all the world is very wicked. Her brothers are very, very wicked: even her mother is not all that she should be. Mournful-eyes see into very sombre sulphureous regions indeed. Echoes of universal gnashing of teeth assail her ears. Her voice is one of warning and condemnation. It is her own conscientious belief that all men, women, and children (with the sole exception of those happy people who sit, with her, under the Reverend Tobias Muggles, in a very damp little chapel, as the provincial penny-a-liner saith, “not twenty miles from” Peckham)—that, with the exception of this chosen band, all living men are doomed. Shall we wonder, then, that her eyes are mournful; and that she looks at me, as any woman with a heart in her would look at a culprit mounting the steps of a gibbet? Marry me! I doubt whether she would shake hands with me.
Let Dr. Brown and his duties of affinity pass from my memory. I am not a marrying man. I am too homely for these sparkling, brightly-dressed ladies about me. I am of the homespun kirtle school; with a liking for the busy, useful, sunny little bodies, with their coquettish aprons and dainty kerchiefs, who loved their nurseries better than their drawing-rooms, and were vastly proud of their home-made jams and pickles in the store-closet, in the days gone by. My own sisters call me a Goth. A breezy stride, then, to the quiet way-side auberge I remember, in its setting of apple-trees, shall give me a zest for dinner, and a couch of poppies at night.
*****
With a healthy glow about me, and an appetite pretty sharply set, I returned to my hotel. The dinner-bell was ringing; and troops of freshly-dressed girls, with highly pomatumed and conspicuously washed fathers, were issuing from every passage, and turning up at every corner. I fell into the merry stream, and floated to my place at the table d’hôte, where I found my napkin properly tied about the unfathomed bottle of Beaune of yesterday. I shall not, in this year of this century, describe a French watering-place table d’hôte. They are all alike, from the soup to the crude peaches, and dried up mendiants; from the loud talker who monopolises the conversation, to the presentable widow, who is the subject of universal scandal. I ate my dinner—as a gourmet should eat, we are told—in solemn silence. The young ladies tittered on all sides; eyes played like forked lightning about me, and about other gentlemen who happened to be under forty; but I kept my eye upon my favourite waiter, and did homage to my appetite.
Almost at my elbow, a quiet little body had sate, silent. There had not been any forked lightning darted from that quarter. It was only when the general stir, and silken rustling of the ladies rising, drew my attention directly to them, that I noticed this quiet little body, with her simple silk dress, plain collar, and closely braided hair. When Wicked-eyes and Tender-eyes rose, they threw their rumpled serviettes anywhere: but when the quiet little body rose, she paused, and carefully folded the cloth she had used, and laid it, in an orderly manner, upon the table.
“That,” I cried, to myself, “that is the wife for me!”
My eyes met hers: and she blushed a little, I thought, that she had been noticed. Presently, I found her, playing with the children, in the court-yard of the hotel.
She has played with children of her own since then. Whether she married me, or my chum, or my enemy, why should I tell?