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DOMESTIC
I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere
with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came
out and was very successful. I was not stunned by the praise which
sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it,
and thought better of my own performance, I have little doubt, than
anybody else did. It has always been in my observation of human
nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself
never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order
that they may believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty
in very self-respect; and the more praise I got, the more I tried
to deserve.
It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials
it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions.
They express themselves, and I leave them to themselves. When I
refer to them, incidentally, it is only as a part of my progress.
Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature
and accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence.
Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and
bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried
to find out what nature and accident really had made me, and to
be that, and nothing else. I had been writing, in the newspaper
and elsewhere, so prosperously, that when my new success was achieved,
I considered myself reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary
debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of
the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard
it since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers,
without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is
more of it), all the livelong session.
I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about
a year and a half. After several varieties of experiment, we had
given up the housekeeping as a bad job. The house kept itself, and
we kept a page. The principal function of this retainer was to quarrel
with the cook; in which respect he was a perfect Whittington, without
his cat, or the remotest chance of being made Lord Mayor.
He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan-lids. His
whole existence was a scuffle. He would shriek for help on the most
improper occasions, - as when we had a little dinner-party, or a
few friends in the evening, - and would come tumbling out of the
kitchen, with iron missiles flying after him. We wanted to get rid
of him, but he was very much attached to us, and wouldn't go. He
was a tearful boy, and broke into such deplorable lamentations,
when a cessation of our connexion was hinted at, that we were obliged
to keep him. He had no mother - no anything in the way of a relative,
that I could discover, except a sister, who fled to America the
moment we had taken him off her hands; and he became quartered on
us like a horrible young changeling. He had a lively perception
of his own unfortunate state, and was always rubbing his eyes with
the sleeve of his jacket, or stooping to blow his nose on the extreme
corner of a little pocket-handkerchief, which he never would take
completely out of his pocket, but always economized and secreted.
This unlucky page, engaged in an evil hour at six pounds ten
per annum, was a source of continual trouble to me. I watched him
as he grew - and he grew like scarlet beans - with painful apprehensions
of the time when he would begin to shave; even of the days when
he would be bald or grey. I saw no prospect of ever getting rid
of him; and, projecting myself into the future, used to think what
an inconvenience he would be when he was an old man.
I never expected anything less, than this unfortunate's manner
of getting me out of my difficulty. He stole Dora's watch, which,
like everything else belonging to us, had no particular place of
its own; and, converting it into money, spent the produce (he was
always a weak-minded boy) in incessantly riding up and down between
London and Uxbridge outside the coach. He was taken to Bow Street,
as well as I remember, on the completion of his fifteenth journey;
when four-and-sixpence, and a second-hand fife which he couldn't
play, were found upon his person.
The surprise and its consequences would have been much less disagreeable
to me if he had not been penitent. But he was very penitent indeed,
and in a peculiar way - not in the lump, but by instalments. For
example: the day after that on which I was obliged to appear against
him, he made certain revelations touching a hamper in the cellar,
which we believed to be full of wine, but which had nothing in it
except bottles and corks. We supposed he had now eased his mind,
and told the worst he knew of the cook; but, a day or two afterwards,
his conscience sustained a new twinge, and he disclosed how she
had a little girl, who, early every morning, took away our bread;
and also how he himself had been suborned to maintain the milkman
in coals. In two or three days more, I was informed by the authorities
of his having led to the discovery of sirloins of beef among the
kitchen-stuff, and sheets in the rag-bag. A little while afterwards,
he broke out in an entirely new direction, and confessed to a knowledge
of burglarious intentions as to our premises, on the part of the
pot-boy, who was immediately taken up. I got to be so ashamed of
being such a victim, that I would have given him any money to hold
his tongue, or would have offered a round bribe for his being permitted
to run away. It was an aggravating circumstance in the case that
he had no idea of this, but conceived that he was making me amends
in every new discovery: not to say, heaping obligations on my head.
At last I ran away myself, whenever I saw an emissary of the
police approaching with some new intelligence; and lived a stealthy
life until he was tried and ordered to be transported. Even then
he couldn't be quiet, but was always writing us letters; and wanted
so much to see Dora before he went away, that Dora went to visit
him, and fainted when she found herself inside the iron bars. In
short, I had no peace of my life until he was expatriated, and made
(as I afterwards heard) a shepherd of, 'up the country' somewhere;
I have no geographical idea where.
All this led me into some serious reflections, and presented
our mistakes in a new aspect; as I could not help communicating
to Dora one evening, in spite of my tenderness for her.
'My love,' said I, 'it is very painful to me to think that our
want of system and management, involves not only ourselves (which
we have got used to), but other people.'
'You have been silent for a long time, and now you are going
to be cross!' said Dora.
'No, my dear, indeed! Let me explain to you what I mean.'
'I think I don't want to know,' said Dora.
'But I want you to know, my love. Put Jip down.'
Dora put his nose to mine, and said 'Boh!' to drive my seriousness
away; but, not succeeding, ordered him into his Pagoda, and sat
looking at me, with her hands folded, and a most resigned little
expression of countenance.
'The fact is, my dear,' I began, 'there is contagion in us. We
infect everyone about us.'
I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora's face
had not admonished me that she was wondering with all her might
whether I was going to propose any new kind of vaccination, or other
medical remedy, for this unwholesome state of ours. Therefore I
checked myself, and made my meaning plainer.
'It is not merely, my pet,' said I, 'that we lose money and comfort,
and even temper sometimes, by not learning to be more careful; but
that we incur the serious responsibility of spoiling everyone who
comes into our service, or has any dealings with us. I begin to
be afraid that the fault is not entirely on one side, but that these
people all turn out ill because we don't turn out very well ourselves.'
'Oh, what an accusation,' exclaimed Dora, opening her eyes wide;
'to say that you ever saw me take gold watches! Oh!'
'My dearest,' I remonstrated, 'don't talk preposterous nonsense!
Who has made the least allusion to gold watches?'
'You did,' returned Dora. 'You know you did. You said I hadn't
turned out well, and compared me to him.'
'To whom?' I asked.
'To the page,' sobbed Dora. 'Oh, you cruel fellow, to compare
your affectionate wife to a transported page! Why didn't you tell
me your opinion of me before we were married? Why didn't you say,
you hard-hearted thing, that you were convinced I was worse than
a transported page? Oh, what a dreadful opinion to have of me! Oh,
my goodness!'
'Now, Dora, my love,' I returned, gently trying to remove the
handkerchief she pressed to her eyes, 'this is not only very ridiculous
of you, but very wrong. In the first place, it's not true.'
'You always said he was a story-teller,' sobbed Dora. 'And now
you say the same of me! Oh, what shall I do! What shall I do!'
'My darling girl,' I retorted, 'I really must entreat you to
be reasonable, and listen to what I did say, and do say. My dear
Dora, unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we employ, they
will never learn to do their duty to us. I am afraid we present
opportunities to people to do wrong, that never ought to be presented.
Even if we were as lax as we are, in all our arrangements, by choice
- which we are not - even if we liked it, and found it agreeable
to be so - which we don't - I am persuaded we should have no right
to go on in this way. We are positively corrupting people. We are
bound to think of that. I can't help thinking of it, Dora. It is
a reflection I am unable to dismiss, and it sometimes makes me very
uneasy. There, dear, that's all. Come now. Don't be foolish!'
Dora would not allow me, for a long time, to remove the handkerchief.
She sat sobbing and murmuring behind it, that, if I was uneasy,
why had I ever been married? Why hadn't I said, even the day before
we went to church, that I knew I should be uneasy, and I would rather
not? If I couldn't bear her, why didn't I send her away to her aunts
at Putney, or to Julia Mills in India? Julia would be glad to see
her, and would not call her a transported page; Julia never had
called her anything of the sort. In short, Dora was so afflicted,
and so afflicted me by being in that condition, that I felt it was
of no use repeating this kind of effort, though never so mildly,
and I must take some other course.
What other course was left to take? To 'form her mind'? This
was a common phrase of words which had a fair and promising sound,
and I resolved to form Dora's mind.
I began immediately. When Dora was very childish, and I would
have infinitely preferred to humour her, I tried to be grave - and
disconcerted her, and myself too. I talked to her on the subjects
which occupied my thoughts; and I read Shakespeare to her - and
fatigued her to the last degree. I accustomed myself to giving her,
as it were quite casually, little scraps of useful information,
or sound opinion - and she started from them when I let them off,
as if they had been crackers. No matter how incidentally or naturally
I endeavoured to form my little wife's mind, I could not help seeing
that she always had an instinctive perception of what I was about,
and became a prey to the keenest apprehensions. In particular, it
was clear to me, that she thought Shakespeare a terrible fellow.
The formation went on very slowly.
I pressed Traddles into the service without his knowledge; and
whenever he came to see us, exploded my mines upon him for the edification
of Dora at second hand. The amount of practical wisdom I bestowed
upon Traddles in this manner was immense, and of the best quality;
but it had no other effect upon Dora than to depress her spirits,
and make her always nervous with the dread that it would be her
turn next. I found myself in the condition of a schoolmaster, a
trap, a pitfall; of always playing spider to Dora's fly, and always
pouncing out of my hole to her infinite disturbance.
Still, looking forward through this intermediate stage, to the
time when there should be a perfect sympathy between Dora and me,
and when I should have 'formed her mind' to my entire satisfaction,
I persevered, even for months. Finding at last, however, that, although
I had been all this time a very porcupine or hedgehog, bristling
all over with determination, I had effected nothing, it began to
occur to me that perhaps Dora's mind was already formed.
On further consideration this appeared so likely, that I abandoned
my scheme, which had had a more promising appearance in words than
in action; resolving henceforth to be satisfied with my child-wife,
and to try to change her into nothing else by any process. I was
heartily tired of being sagacious and prudent by myself, and of
seeing my darling under restraint; so I bought a pretty pair of
ear-rings for her, and a collar for Jip, and went home one day to
make myself agreeable.
Dora was delighted with the little presents, and kissed me joyfully;
but there was a shadow between us, however slight, and I had made
up my mind that it should not be there. If there must be such a
shadow anywhere, I would keep it for the future in my own breast.
I sat down by my wife on the sofa, and put the ear-rings in her
ears; and then I told her that I feared we had not been quite as
good company lately, as we used to be, and that the fault was mine.
Which I sincerely felt, and which indeed it was.
'The truth is, Dora, my life,' I said; 'I have been trying to
be wise.'
'And to make me wise too,' said Dora, timidly. 'Haven't you,
Doady?'
I nodded assent to the pretty inquiry of the raised eyebrows,
and kissed the parted lips.
'It's of not a bit of use,' said Dora, shaking her head, until
the ear-rings rang again. 'You know what a little thing I am, and
what I wanted you to call me from the first. If you can't do so,
I am afraid you'll never like me. Are you sure you don't think,
sometimes, it would have been better to have -'
'Done what, my dear?' For she made no effort to proceed.
'Nothing!' said Dora.
'Nothing?' I repeated.
She put her arms round my neck, and laughed, and called herself
by her favourite name of a goose, and hid her face on my shoulder
in such a profusion of curls that it was quite a task to clear them
away and see it.
'Don't I think it would have been better to have done nothing,
than to have tried to form my little wife's mind?' said I, laughing
at myself. 'Is that the question? Yes, indeed, I do.'
'Is that what you have been trying?' cried Dora. 'Oh what a shocking
boy!'
'But I shall never try any more,' said I. 'For I love her dearly
as she is.'
'Without a story - really?' inquired Dora, creeping closer to
me.
'Why should I seek to change,' said I, 'what has been so precious
to me for so long! You never can show better than as your own natural
self, my sweet Dora; and we'll try no conceited experiments, but
go back to our old way, and be happy.'
'And be happy!' returned Dora. 'Yes! All day! And you won't mind
things going a tiny morsel wrong, sometimes?'
'No, no,' said I. 'We must do the best we can.'
'And you won't tell me, any more, that we make other people bad,'
coaxed Dora; 'will you? Because you know it's so dreadfully cross!'
'No, no,' said I.
'it's better for me to be stupid than uncomfortable, isn't it?'
said Dora.
'Better to be naturally Dora than anything else in the world.'
'In the world! Ah, Doady, it's a large place!'
She shook her head, turned her delighted bright eyes up to mine,
kissed me, broke into a merry laugh, and sprang away to put on Jip's
new collar.
So ended my last attempt to make any change in Dora. I had been
unhappy in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom;
I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife.
I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings
myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I
must degenerate into the spider again, and be for ever lying in
wait.
And the shadow I have mentioned, that was not to be between us
any more, but was to rest wholly on my own heart? How did that fall?
The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if
it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed
me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night.
I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had
vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and
there was always something wanting.
In fulfilment of the compact I have made with myself, to reflect
my mind on this paper, I again examine it, closely, and bring its
secrets to the light. What I missed, I still regarded - I always
regarded - as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy;
that was incapable of realization; that I was now discovering to
be so, with some natural pain, as all men did. But that it would
have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and
shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner; and that this
might have been; I knew.
Between these two irreconcilable conclusions: the one, that what
I felt was general and unavoidable; the other, that it was particular
to me, and might have been different: I balanced curiously, with
no distinct sense of their opposition to each other. When I thought
of the airy dreams of youth that are incapable of realization, I
thought of the better state preceding manhood that I had outgrown;
and then the contented days with Agnes, in the dear old house, arose
before me, like spectres of the dead, that might have some renewal
in another world, but never more could be reanimated here.
Sometimes, the speculation came into my thoughts, What might
have happened, or what would have happened, if Dora and I had never
known each other? But she was so incorporated with my existence,
that it was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of
my reach and sight, like gossamer floating in the air.
I always loved her. What I am describing, slumbered, and half
awoke, and slept again, in the innermost recesses of my mind. There
was no evidence of it in me; I know of no influence it had in anything
I said or did. I bore the weight of all our little cares, and all
my projects; Dora held the pens; and we both felt that our shares
were adjusted as the case required. She was truly fond of me, and
proud of me; and when Agnes wrote a few earnest words in her letters
to Dora, of the pride and interest with which my old friends heard
of my growing reputation, and read my book as if they heard me speaking
its contents, Dora read them out to me with tears of joy in her
bright eyes, and said I was a dear old clever, famous boy.
'The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.' Those
words of Mrs. Strong's were constantly recurring to me, at this
time; were almost always present to my mind. I awoke with them,
often, in the night; I remember to have even read them, in dreams,
inscribed upon the walls of houses. For I knew, now, that my own
heart was undisciplined when it first loved Dora; and that if it
had been disciplined, it never could have felt, when we were married,
what it had felt in its secret experience.
'There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of
mind and purpose.' Those words I remembered too. I had endeavoured
to adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained
for me to adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could,
and be happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be happy
still. This was the discipline to which I tried to bring my heart,
when I began to think. It made my second year much happier than
my first; and, what was better still, made Dora's life all sunshine.
But, as that year wore on, Dora was not strong. I had hoped that
lighter hands than mine would help to mould her character, and that
a baby-smile upon her breast might change my child-wife to a woman.
It was not to be. The spirit fluttered for a moment on the threshold
of its little prison, and, unconscious of captivity, took wing.
'When I can run about again, as I used to do, aunt,' said Dora,
'I shall make Jip race. He is getting quite slow and lazy.'
'I suspect, my dear,' said my aunt quietly working by her side,
'he has a worse disorder than that. Age, Dora.'
'Do you think he is old?' said Dora, astonished. 'Oh, how strange
it seems that Jip should be old!'
'It's a complaint we are all liable to, Little One, as we get
on in life,' said my aunt, cheerfully; 'I don't feel more free from
it than I used to be, I assure you.'
'But Jip,' said Dora, looking at him with compassion, 'even little
Jip! Oh, poor fellow!'
'I dare say he'll last a long time yet, Blossom,' said my aunt,
patting Dora on the cheek, as she leaned out of her couch to look
at Jip, who responded by standing on his hind legs, and baulking
himself in various asthmatic attempts to scramble up by the head
and shoulders. 'He must have a piece of flannel in his house this
winter, and I shouldn't wonder if he came out quite fresh again,
with the flowers in the spring. Bless the little dog!' exclaimed
my aunt, 'if he had as many lives as a cat, and was on the point
of losing 'em all, he'd bark at me with his last breath, I believe!'
Dora had helped him up on the sofa; where he really was defying
my aunt to such a furious extent, that he couldn't keep straight,
but barked himself sideways. The more my aunt looked at him, the
more he reproached her; for she had lately taken to spectacles,
and for some inscrutable reason he considered the glasses personal.
Dora made him lie down by her, with a good deal of persuasion;
and when he was quiet, drew one of his long ears through and through
her hand, repeating thoughtfully, 'Even little Jip! Oh, poor fellow!'
'His lungs are good enough,' said my aunt, gaily, 'and his dislikes
are not at all feeble. He has a good many years before him, no doubt.
But if you want a dog to race with, Little Blossom, he has lived
too well for that, and I'll give you one.'
'Thank you, aunt,' said Dora, faintly. 'But don't, please!'
'No?' said my aunt, taking off her spectacles.
'I couldn't have any other dog but Jip,' said Dora. 'It would
be so unkind to Jip! Besides, I couldn't be such friends with any
other dog but Jip; because he wouldn't have known me before I was
married, and wouldn't have barked at Doady when he first came to
our house. I couldn't care for any other dog but Jip, I am afraid,
aunt.'
'To be sure!' said my aunt, patting her cheek again. 'You are
right.'
'You are not offended,' said Dora. 'Are you?'
'Why, what a sensitive pet it is!' cried my aunt, bending over
her affectionately. 'To think that I could be offended!'
'No, no, I didn't really think so,' returned Dora; 'but I am
a little tired, and it made me silly for a moment - I am always
a silly little thing, you know, but it made me more silly - to talk
about Jip. He has known me in all that has happened to me, haven't
you, Jip? And I couldn't bear to slight him, because he was a little
altered - could I, Jip?'
Jip nestled closer to his mistress, and lazily licked her hand.
'You are not so old, Jip, are you, that you'll leave your mistress
yet?' said Dora. 'We may keep one another company a little longer!'
My pretty Dora! When she came down to dinner on the ensuing Sunday,
and was so glad to see old Traddles (who always dined with us on
Sunday), we thought she would be 'running about as she used to do',
in a few days. But they said, wait a few days more; and then, wait
a few days more; and still she neither ran nor walked. She looked
very pretty, and was very merry; but the little feet that used to
be so nimble when they danced round Jip, were dull and motionless.
I began to carry her downstairs every morning, and upstairs every
night. She would clasp me round the neck and laugh, the while, as
if I did it for a wager. Jip would bark and caper round us, and
go on before, and look back on the landing, breathing short, to
see that we were coming. My aunt, the best and most cheerful of
nurses, would trudge after us, a moving mass of shawls and pillows.
Mr. Dick would not have relinquished his post of candle-bearer to
anyone alive. Traddles would be often at the bottom of the staircase,
looking on, and taking charge of sportive messages from Dora to
the dearest girl in the world. We made quite a gay procession of
it, and my child-wife was the gayest there.
But, sometimes, when I took her up, and felt that she was lighter
in my arms, a dead blank feeling came upon me, as if I were approaching
to some frozen region yet unseen, that numbed my life. I avoided
the recognition of this feeling by any name, or by any communing
with myself; until one night, when it was very strong upon me, and
my aunt had left her with a parting cry of 'Good night, Little Blossom,'
I sat down at my desk alone, and cried to think, Oh what a fatal
name it was, and how the blossom withered in its bloom upon the
tree!
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