A Natural Obstacle
by
Her father had insisted on her learning book-keeping, so that she might escape the common lot of young womanhood; to sit there and wait for a husband.
She was now employed as book-keeper in the goods department of the Railways, and was universally looked upon as a very capable young woman. She had a way of getting on with people, and her prospects were excellent.
Then she met the green forester from the School of Forestry and married him. They had made up their minds not to have any children; theirs was to be a true, spiritual marriage, and the world was to be made to realise that a woman, too, has a soul, and is not merely sex. Husband and wife met at dinner in the evening. It really was a true marriage, the union of two souls; it was, of course, also the union of two bodies, but this is a point one does not discuss.
One day the wife came home and told her husband that her office hours had been changed. The directors had decided to run a new night train to Malmo, and in future she would have to be at her office from six to nine in the evening. It was a nuisance, for he could not come home before six. That was quite impossible.
Henceforth they had to dine separately and meet only at night. He was dissatisfied. He hated the long evenings.
He fell into the habit of calling for her. But he found it dull to sit on a chair in the goods department and have the porters knocking against him. He was always in the way. And when he tried to talk to her as she sat at her desk with the penholder behind her ear, she interrupted him with a curt:
“Oh! do be quiet until I’ve done!”
Then the porters turned away their faces and he could see by their backs that they were laughing.
Sometimes one or the other of her colleagues announced him with a:
“Your husband is waiting for you, Mrs. X.”
“Your husband!” There was something scornful in the very way in which they pronounced the word.
But what irritated him more than anything else was the fact that the desk nearest to her was occupied by a “young ass” who was always gazing into her eyes and everlastingly consulting the ledger, bending over her shoulders so that he almost touched her with his chin. And they talked of invoices and certificates, of things which might have meant anything for all he knew. And they compared papers and figures and seemed to be on more familiar terms with one another than husband and wife were. And that was quite natural, for she saw more of the young ass than of her husband. It struck him that their marriage was not a true spiritual marriage after all; in order to be that he, too, would have had to be employed in the goods department. But as it happened he was at the School of Forestry.
One day, or rather one night, she told him that on the following Saturday a meeting of railway employes, which was to conclude with a dinner, would be held, and that she would have to be present. Her husband received the communication with a little air of constraint.
“Do you want to go?” he asked naively.
“Of course, I do!”
“But you will be the only woman amongst so many men, and when men have had too much to drink, they are apt to become coarse.”
“Don’t you attend the meetings of the School of Forestry without me?”
“Certainly, but I am not the only man amongst a lot of women.”
“Men and women were equals, she was amazed that he, who had always preached the emancipation of women could have any objection to her attending the meeting.”
“He admitted that it was nothing but prejudice on his part. He admitted that she was right and that he was wrong, but all the same he begged her not to go; he hated the idea. He couldn’t get over the fact.”