The Plain Man and His Wife - Arnold Bennett (best romance novels of all time txt) 📗

the well-balanced Anglo-Saxon male acquire it, what a grand world we should live in! The most important thing in the world would be transformed. The most important thing in the world is, ultimately, married life, and the chief practical use of the quality of imagination is to ameliorate married life. But who in England or America (or elsewhere) thinks of it in that connection? The plain man considers that imagination is all very well for poets and novelists. Blockhead! Yes, despite my high esteem for him, I will apply to him the Johnsonian term of abuse. Blockhead! Imagination is super-eminently for himself, and was beyond doubt invented by Providence in order that the plain man might chiefly exercise it in the plain, drudging dailiness of married life. The day cometh, if tardily, when he will do so.


II


These reflections have surged up in my brain as I contemplate the recent case of my acquaintance, Mr. Omicron, and they are preliminary to a study of that interesting case. Scarce a week ago Omicron was sitting in the Omicron drawing-room alone with Mrs. Omicron. It was an average Omicron evening. Omicron is aged thirty-two. He is neither successful nor unsuccessful, and no human perspicacity can say whether twenty years hence he will be successful or unsuccessful. But anybody can see that he is already on the way to be a plain, well-balanced man. Somewhat earlier than usual he is losing the fanciful capricious qualities and settling down into the stiff backbone of the nation.

Conversation was not abundant.

Said Mrs. Omicron suddenly, with an ingratiating accent:

"What about that ring that I was to have?"

There was a pause, in which every muscle of the man's body, and especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul, perceptibly stiffened. And then Omicron answered, curtly, rebuttingly, reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:

"I don't know."

And took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch armour-plating.

The subject was dropped.

It had endured about ten seconds. But those ten seconds marked an epoch in Omicron's career as a husband--and he knew it not. He knew it not, but the whole of his conjugal future had hung evenly in the balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but definitely--to the wrong side.

Of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface. At dinner the otherwise excellent leg of mutton had proved on cutting to be most noticeably underdone. Now, it is a monstrous shame that first-class mutton should be wasted through inefficient cookery; with third-class mutton the crime might have been deemed less awful. Moreover, four days previously another excellent dish had been rendered unfit for masculine consumption by precisely the same inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it. Nor was that all. The coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. The feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the kitchen at the last moment had discovered itself to be short of coffee. An entirely commonplace episode! Yes, but it is out of commonplace episodes that martyrs are made, and Omicron had been made a martyr. He, if none else, was fully aware that evening that he was a martyr. And the woman had selected just that evening to raise the question of rings, gauds, futile ornamentations! He had said little. But he had stood for the universal husband, and in Mrs. Omicron he saw the universal wife.


III


His reflections ran somewhat thus:

"Surely a simple matter to keep enough coffee in the house! A schoolgirl could do it! And yet they let themselves run short of coffee! I ask for nothing out of the way. I make no inordinate demands on the household. But I do like good coffee. And I can't have it! Strange! As for that mutton--one would think there was no clock in the kitchen. One would think that nobody had ever cooked a leg of mutton before. How many legs of mutton have they cooked between them in their lives? Scores; hundreds; I dare say thousands. And yet it hasn't yet dawned on them that a leg of mutton of a certain weight requires a certain time for cooking, and that if it is put down late one of two things must occur--either it will be undercooked or the dinner will be late! Simple enough! Logical enough! Four women in the house (three servants and the wicked, negligent Mrs. Omicron), and yet they must needs waste a leg of mutton through nothing but gross carelessness! It isn't as if it hadn't happened before! It isn't as if I hadn't pointed it out! But women are amateurs. All women are alike. All housekeeping is amateurish. She (Mrs. Omicron, the criminal) has nothing in this world to do but run the house--and see how she runs it! No order! No method! Has she ever studied housekeeping scientifically? Not she! Does she care? Not she! If she had any real sense of responsibility, if she had the slightest glimmering of her own short-comings, she wouldn't have started on the ring question. But there you are! She only thinks of spending, and titivating herself. I wish she had to do a little earning. She'd find out a thing or two then. She'd find out that life isn't all moonstones and motor-cars. Ring, indeed! It's the lack of tact that annoys me. I am an ill-used man. All husbands are ill-used men. The whole system wants altering. However, I must keep my end up. And I will keep my end up. Ring, indeed! No tact!"

He fostered a secret fury. And he enjoyed fostering it. There was exaggeration in these thoughts, which, he would admit next day, were possibly too sweeping in their scope. But he would maintain the essential truth of them. He was not really and effectively furious against Mrs. Omicron; he did not, as a fact, class her with forgers and drunken chauffeurs; indeed, the fellow loved her in his fashion. But he did pass a mature judgment against her. He did wrap up his grudge in cotton-wool and put it in a drawer and examine it with perverse pleasure now and then. He did increase that secretion of poison which weakens the social health of nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand married lives--however delightful they may be. He did render more permanent a noxious habit of mind. He did appreciably and doubly and finally impair the conjugal happiness--for it must not be forgotten that in creating a grievance for himself he also gave his wife a grievance. He did, in fine, contribute to the general mass of misunderstanding between sex and sex.

If he is reading this, as he assuredly is, Mr. Omicron will up and exclaim:

"My wife a grievance! Absurd! The facts are incontrovertible. What grievance can she have?"

The grievance that Mr. Omicron, becoming every day more and more the plain man, is not exercising imagination in the very field where it is most needed.

What is a home, Mr. Omicron? You reply that a home is a home. You have always had a home. You were born in one. With luck you will die in one. And you have never regarded a home as anything but a home. Your leading idea has ever been that a home is emphatically not an office nor a manufactory. But suppose you were to unscale your eyes--that is to say, use your imagination--try to see that a home, in addition to being a home, is an office and manufactory for the supply of light, warmth, cleanliness, ease, and food to a given number of people? Suppose you were to allow it to occur to you that a home emphatically is an organization similar to an office and manufactory--and an extremely complicated and delicate one, with many diverse departments, functioning under extremely difficult conditions? For thus it in truth is. Could you once accomplish this feat of imaginative faculty, you would never again say, with that disdainful accent of yours: "Mrs. Omicron has nothing in the world to do but run the house." For really it would be just as clever for her to say: "Mr. Omicron has nothing in the world to do but run the office."

I admit heartily that Mrs. Omicron is not perfect. She ought to be, of course; but she, alas! falls short of the ideal. Yet in some details she can and does show the way to that archangel, her husband. When her office and manufactory goes wrong, you, Mr. Omicron, are righteously indignant and superior. You majestically wonder that with four women in the house, etc., etc. But when you come home and complain that things are askew in your masculine establishment, and that a period of economy must set in, does she say to you with scorn: "Don't dare to mention coffee to-night. I really wonder that with fourteen (or a hundred and forty) grown men in your establishment you cannot produce an ample and regular income?" No; she makes the best of it. She is sympathetic. And you, Mr. Omicron, would be excessively startled and wounded if she were not sympathetic. Put your imagination to work and you will see how interesting are these comparisons.


IV


She is an amateur at her business, you say. Well, perhaps she is. But who brought her up to be an amateur? Are you not content to carry on the ancient tradition? As you meditate, and you often do meditate, upon that infant daughter of yours now sleeping in her cot, do you dream of giving her a scientific education in housekeeping, or do you dream of endowing her with the charms that music and foreign languages and physical grace can offer? Do you in your mind's eye see her cannily choosing beef at the butcher's, or shining for your pleasure in the drawing-room?

And then Mrs. Omicron is, perhaps, not so much of an amateur as you assume. People learn by practice. Is there any reason in human nature why a complex machine such as a house may be worked with fewer breakdowns than an office or manufactory? Harness your imagination once more and transfer to your house the multitudinous minor catastrophes that happen in your office. Be sincere, and admit that the efficiency of the average office is naught but a pretty legend. A mistake or negligence or forgetfulness in an office is remedied and forgotten. Mrs. Omicron--my dear Mr. Omicron--never hears of it. Not so with Mrs. Omicron's office, as your aroused imagination will tell you. Mrs. Omicron's parlourmaid's duster fails to make contact with one small portion of the hall-table. Mr. Omicron walks in, and his godlike glance drops instantly on the dusty place, and Mr. Omicron ejaculates sardonically: "H'm! Four women in the house, and they can't even keep the hall-table respectable!"

Mr. Omicron forgets a letter at the bottom of his unanswered-letter basket, and a week later an excited cable arrives from overseas, and that cable demands another cable. No real harm has been done. Ten dollars spent on cables have cured the ill. Mrs. Omicron, preoccupied with a rash on the back of the neck of Miss Omicron before-mentioned, actually comes back from town without having ordered the mutton. In the afternoon she realizes her horrid sin and rushes to the telephone. The butcher reassures her. He swears the desired leg shall arrive. But do you see that boy dallying at the street corner with his mate? He carries the leg of mutton, and he carries also, though he knows it not nor cares, the reputation and happiness of Mrs. Omicron. He is late. As you yourself remarked, Mr. Omicron, if a leg