Here are Ladies | Page 6

leaning forward with her hands clasping her knees--"Do you really and truly think I am pretty? I met a man one time, he had a brown moustache and blue eyes, outside a tailor's shop in Georges Street, with a public-house on one side, and he said he thought I was very pretty: he told me what his name was, but I forget it: maybe, you know him: he wears a tweed suit with a stripe and a soft hat--Let me see, no, his name began with a T----"
"His name was Thief," he roared, "and that was his profession too. Don't let me catch you talking with a strange man, or you'll get hurt, and his brown eyes will be mixed up with his blue moustache."
So married they were, six months now, and the wits were nearly worried out of him in trying to keep pace with his wife's vagaries. Matrimony had not cured her love for side-streets, short cuts and chance acquaintances, and she was gradually making her husband travel at a similar tangent. When they started to go to church he would find, to his amazement, that they were in the Museum. If they journeyed with a Museum for an objective they were certain to pull up in the Botanic Gardens. A call on a friend usually turned into a visit to a theatre or a walk by the Dodder--
"Heart-scalded I am," said he, "with her hopping and trotting. She travels sideways like a crab, so she does. She has a squint in her walk. Her boots have a bias outwards. I'm getting bow-legged, so I am, slewing round corners after her. I'll have to put my foot down," said he.
And now it was all finished. Here was twelve o'clock at night and an absent wife--a detestable combination. Twelve o'clock at night outside a house is an immoral hour, inside a house it is non-moral, but respectable. There is nothing in the street at that time but dubiety. Who would be a husband listening through the tolling of midnight for a muffled footfall?--And he had told her not to go: had given an order, formulated his imperative and inflexible will--
"Never mind! I'll stand by it," said he, "this is the last straw. One break and then freedom. Surgery is better than tinkering. Cut the knot and let who will try to join it then. One pang, and afterwards ease, fresh air, and freedom: fresh air! gulps of it, with the head back and an easy mind. I'm not the man to be fooled for ever--surgery! surgery!"
His wife had wished to see a friend that night and requested her husband to go with her--he refused--
"You're always trapsin about," said he.
She entreated.
He heaved an angry forehead at her, puckered an eye, toned a long No that wagged vibration behind it like an undocked tail.
She persisted, whereupon he loosed his thunder--
"You're not to step outside the house this night, ma'am," said he; and to her angry "I will go," he barked, "If you do go, don't come back here. I'll have a dutiful wife or I'll have none--stay in or stay out. I'm tired humouring your whimsies, let you humour mine now----"
Then a flame gathered on her face, it grew hot in her voice, flashed to a point in her eyes--
"I'm going out to-night," said she loudly; "are you coming with me?"
"I'm not," said he.
"Then," she snapped, "I'll go by myself."
"Wherever you go to-night you can stay," he roared. "Don't come back to this house."
"I'm not mad enough to want to," she replied. "I wish I'd never seen your old house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You are just as dull as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting, slow house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatisfied grump of a man, so you are. I'd sooner live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I would----" and out she ran.
Two minutes later he had heard the door bang, and then silence.
That was five hours ago, and during all these long hours he had sat staring sourly into the fire, seeing goodness knows what burnt-up visions therein, waiting to hear a footfall, and an entreating voice at the key-hole; apologies and tears perhaps, and promises of amendment. Now it was after twelve o'clock, darkness everywhere and silence. Time and again a policeman's tramp or the hasty, light footfall of adventure went by. So he stood up at last sour and vindictive--
"She would have her fling. She wouldn't give in. She doesn't care a tinker's curse what I say. . . . Let her go to Jericho," said he, and he tramped up to bed.
In his bedroom he did not trouble to get a light. He undressed in a bitterly savage mood and rolled into