The Plain Man and His Wife | Page 2

is the use of
being happy unless he knows he is happy? Some men know that they
are happy in the hours of business, but they are few. The majority are
not, and the bulk of the majority do not even pretend to be. The whole
attitude of the average plain man to business implies that business is a
nuisance, scarcely mitigated. With what secret satisfaction he
anticipates that visit to the barber's in the middle of the morning! With
what gusto he hails the arrival of an unexpected interrupting friend!
With what easement he decides that he may lawfully put off some task
till the morrow! Let him hear a band or a fire-engine in the street, and
he will go to the window with the eagerness of a child or of a girl-clerk.
If he were working at golf the bands of all the regiments of
Hohenzollern would not make him turn his head, nor the multitudinous
blazing of fireproof skyscrapers. No! Let us be honest. Business
constitutes the steepest, roughest league of the appointed path. Were it
otherwise, business would not be universally regarded as a means to an
end.
Moreover, when the plain man gets home again, does his wife's face
say to him: "I know that your real life is now over for the day, and I
regret for your sake that you have to return here. I know that the
powerful interest of your life is gone. But I am glad that you have had
five, six, seven, or eight hours of passionate pleasure"? Not a bit! His
wife's face says to him: "I commiserate with you on all that you have
been through. It is a great shame that you should be compelled to toil
thus painfully. But I will try to make it up to you. I will soothe you. I
will humour you. Forget anxiety and fatigue in my smiles." She does
not fetch his comfortable slippers for him, partly because, in this
century, wives do not do such things, and partly because comfortable
slippers are no longer worn. But she does the equivalent--whatever the
equivalent may happen to be in that particular household. And he
expects the commiseration and the solace in her face. He would be very

hurt did he not find it there.
And even yet he is not relaxed. Even yet the appointed path stretches
inexorably in front, and he cannot wander. For now he feels the cogs
and cranks of the highly complex domestic machine. At breakfast he
declined to hear them; they were shut off from him; he was too busy to
be bothered with them. At evening he must be bothered with them. Was
it not he who created the machine? He discovers, often to his
astonishment, that his wife has an existence of her own, full of factors
foreign to him, and he has to project himself, not only into his wife's
existence, but into the existences of other minor personages. His
daughter, for example, will persist in growing up. Not for a single day
will she pause. He arrives one night and perceives that she is a woman
and that he must treat her as a woman. He had not bargained for this.
Peace, ease, relaxation in a home vibrating to the whir of such
astounding phenomena? Impossible dream! These phenomena were
originally meant by him to be the ornamentation of his career, but they
are threatening to be the sole reason of his career. If his wife lives for
him, it is certain that he lives just as much for his wife; and as for his
daughter, while she emphatically does not live for him, he is bound to
admit that he has just got to live for her--and she knows it!
To gain money was exhausting; to spend it is precisely as exhausting.
He cannot quit the appointed path nor lift the doom. Dinner is finished
ere he has begun to recover from the varied shock of home. Then his
daughter may negligently throw him a few moments of charming
cajolery. He may gossip in simple idleness with his wife. He may
gambol like any infant with the dog. A yawn. The shadow of the next
day is upon him. He must not stay up too late, lest the vigour demanded
by the next day should be impaired. Besides, he does not want to stay
up. Naught is quite interesting enough to keep him up. And bed, too, is
part of the appointed, unescapable path. To bed he goes, carrying ten
million preoccupations. And of his state of mind the kindest that can be
said is that he is philosophic enough to hope for the best.
And after the night he wakes up, slowly or quickly according to his
temperament, and