FullReads

The foolish refrain of one of these recurred to West, ding-dong, pertinaciously at his ear:

“They know me well at the County Bank,
Cash is better than fame or rank,
Then hey go lucky! I’ll marry me ducky,
The Belle of the Rose and Crown.”

And now Catterson, with pinched features, sunken eyes, and contracted chest, sat there pouring out a flood of bitterness against himself, life, and the gods for the granting of his prayer.

“You remember Nettie before I married her? Did she not appear the gentlest, the sweetest, the most docile girl in the world? Who would ever have imagined she could have learned to bully her husband and insult his friends?

“But the moment her position was assured she changed; changed completely. Why, look here, West, the very day we were married–you remember we went down to Brighton, and were married there–as we walked back along the King’s Road, she stopped me before a shop and said, ‘You can just come in here and buy me some furs. Now I’m your wife you needn’t suppose I’m going through another winter in my wretched little old coat of last year.’ It was her tone; the implication of what she had had to endure at my hands, before she had the right to command me. It was the first lifting of the veil on her true character.

“Perhaps if I had never married her–who knows? Women require to be kept under, to be afraid of you, to live in a condition of insecurity; to know that their good fortune is dependent on their good conduct.

“I did the right thing? Yes… but we are told, be not righteous overmuch; and there are some virtues which dig their own graves.”

He spoke in a disconnected manner; but his domestic misery was the string which threaded the different beads. Of West’s interjected sympathy and well-meant efforts to turn his thoughts he took no heed.

“‘Marriage is the metamorphosis of women.’ Where did I read that lately? It’s odd; but everything I now read relates to marriage. In every book I take up I find an emphatic warning against it. Why couldn’t these have come in my way sooner? Why couldn’t some one tell me?

Marriage is the metamorphosis of women–the Circe wand which changes back all these smiling, gentle, tractable, little girls into their true forms.

“Oh, but after all, you say? … No, my wife does none of those things; but she has made my life miserable, miserable… and that’s enough for me. And if I were to try and explain how she does it, I daresay you would only laugh at me. For there’s nothing tragic in the process. It’s the thousand pin-pricks of daily life, the little oppositions, the little perversities, the faint sneers. At first you let them slip off again almost indifferently, but the slightest blow, repeated upon the same place a thousand times, draws blood at last.

“No, she doesn’t care for me, and sometimes I almost think she hates the boy. Poor boy… it seems monstrous, incredible; but I’ve caught her looking at him with a hardness, a coldness…”

He sat silent, looking wistfully away into space. West traced the beginning of a pleasanter train of ideas in the relaxed corners of his mouth, in the brightening of his sunken eyes.

“He’s the dearest little chap, West! And so clever! Do you know, I believe he’ll have the most extraordinarily logical and mathematical mind. He has begun to meditate already over what seems to him the arbitrariness of names. He wanted to know the other day, for instance, how a table had come to be called a table, why it wasn’t called a chair, or anything else you like. And this morning, when we were talking, he and I, over the present I had given him, he posed me with this problem: Supposing two horses harnessed to a cart, were galloping with it, just as fast as ever they could go, how much faster could ten horses gallop with it? Shows he thinks, eh? Not bad for a child of four?”