“Incredible!” I cried. “I can understand that there might well be a type of men who assault their wives, but not, surely, a type of women who get assaulted.”
“That is because you know less about it than Nurse Wade,” Travers answered, with an annoying smile of superior knowledge.
Our instructress moved on to another bed, laying one gentle hand as she passed on a patient’s forehead. The patient glanced gratitude. “That one again,” she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance: “Number 74. She has much the same thin hair—sparse, weak, and colourless. She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features. Looks capable, doesn’t she? A born housewife!… Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the other night by her husband.”
“It is certainly odd,” I answered, “how very much they both recall—”
“Our friend at lunch! Yes, extraordinary. See here”; she pulled out a pencil and drew the quick outline of a face in her note-book. “THAT is what is central and essential to the type. They have THIS sort of profile. Women with faces like that ALWAYS get assaulted.”
Travers glanced over her shoulder. “Quite true,” he assented, with his bourgeois nod. “Nurse Wade in her time has shown me dozens of them. Round dozens: bakers’ dozens! They all belong to that species. In fact, when a woman of this type is brought in to us wounded now, I ask at once, ‘Husband?’ and the invariable answer comes pat: ‘Well, yes, sir; we had some words together.’ The effect of words, my dear fellow, is something truly surprising.”
“They can pierce like a dagger,” I mused.
“And leave an open wound behind that requires dressing,” Travers added, unsuspecting. Practical man, Travers!
“But WHY do they get assaulted—the women of this type?” I asked, still bewildered.
“Number 87 has her mother just come to see her,” my sorceress interposed. “SHE’S an assault case; brought in last night; badly kicked and bruised about the head and shoulders. Speak to the mother. She’ll explain it all to you.”
Travers and I moved over to the cot her hand scarcely indicated. “Well, your daughter looks pretty comfortable this afternoon, in spite of the little fuss,” Travers began, tentatively.
“Yus, she’s a bit tidy, thanky,” the mother answered, smoothing her soiled black gown, grown green with long service. “She’ll git on naow, please Gord. But Joe most did for ‘er.”
“How did it all happen?” Travers asked, in a jaunty tone, to draw her out.
“Well, it was like this, sir, yer see. My daughter, she’s a lidy as keeps ‘erself TO ‘erself, as the sayin’ is, an’ ‘olds ‘er ‘ead up. She keeps up a proper pride, an’ minds ‘er ‘ouse an’ ‘er little uns. She ain’t no gadabaht. But she ‘AVE a tongue, she ‘ave”; the mother lowered her voice cautiously, lest the “lidy” should hear. “I don’t deny it that she ‘AVE a tongue, at times, through myself ‘avin’ suffered from it. And when she DO go on, Lord bless you, why, there ain’t no stoppin’ of ‘er.”
“Oh, she has a tongue, has she?” Travers replied, surveying the “case” critically. “Well, you know, she looks like it.”
“So she do, sir; so she do. An’ Joe, ‘e’s a man as wouldn’t ‘urt a biby—not when ‘e’s sober, Joe wouldn’t. But ‘e’d bin aht; that’s where it is; an’ ‘e cum ‘ome lite, a bit fresh, through ‘avin’ bin at the friendly lead; an’ my daughter, yer see, she up an’ give it to ‘im. My word, she DID give it to ‘im! An’ Joe, ‘e’s a peaceable man when ‘e ain’t a bit fresh; ‘e’s more like a friend to ‘er than an ‘usband, Joe is; but ‘e lost ‘is temper that time, as yer may say, by reason o’ bein’ fresh, an’ ‘e knocked ‘er abaht a little, an’ knocked ‘er teeth aht. So we brought ‘er to the orspital.”
The injured woman raised herself up in bed with a vindictive scowl, displaying as she did so the same whale-like curved back as in the other “cases.” “But we’ve sent ‘im to the lockup,” she continued, the scowl giving way fast to a radiant joy of victory as she contemplated her triumph “an’ wot’s more, I ‘ad the last word of ‘im. ‘An ‘e’ll git six month for this, the neighbours says; an’ when he comes aht again, my Gord, won’t ‘e ketch it!”
“You look capable of punishing him for it,” I answered, and as I spoke, I shuddered; for I saw her expression was precisely the expression Mrs. Le Geyt’s face had worn for a passing second when her husband accidentally trod on her dress as we left the dining-room.
My witch moved away. We followed. “Well, what do you say to it now?” she asked, gliding among the beds with noiseless feet and ministering fingers.
“Say to it?” I answered. “That it is wonderful, wonderful. You have quite convinced me.”
“You would think so,” Travers put in, “if you had been in this ward as often as I have, and observed their faces. It’s a dead certainty. Sooner or later, that type of woman is cock-sure to be assaulted.”
“In a certain rank of life, perhaps,” I answered, still loth to believe it; “but not surely in ours. Gentlemen do not knock down their wives and kick their teeth out.”
My Sibyl smiled. “No; there class tells,” she admitted. “They take longer about it, and suffer more provocation. They curb their tempers. But in the end, one day, they are goaded beyond endurance; and then—a convenient knife—a rusty old sword—a pair of scissors—anything that comes handy, like that dagger this morning. One wild blow—half unpremeditated—and… the thing is done! Twelve good men and true will find it wilful murder.”
I felt really perturbed. “But can we do nothing,” I cried, “to warn poor Hugo?”
“Nothing, I fear,” she answered. “After all, character must work itself out in its interactions with character. He has married that woman, and he must take the consequences. Does not each of us in life suffer perforce the Nemesis of his own temperament?”
“Then is there not also a type of men who assault their wives?”
“That is the odd part of it—no. All kinds, good and bad, quick and slow, can be driven to it at last. The quick-tempered stab or kick; the slow devise some deliberate means of ridding themselves of their burden.”
“But surely we might caution Le Geyt of his danger!”
“It is useless. He would not believe us. We cannot be at his elbow to hold back his hand when the bad moment comes. Nobody will be there, as a matter of fact; for women of this temperament—born naggers, in short, since that’s what it comes to—when they are also ladies, graceful and gracious as she is; never nag at all before outsiders. To the world, they are bland; everybody says, ‘What charming talkers!’ They are ‘angels abroad, devils at home,’ as the proverb puts it. Some night she will provoke him when they are alone, till she has reached his utmost limit of endurance—and then,” she drew one hand across her dove-like throat, “it will be all finished.”
“You think so?”
“I am sure of it. We human beings go straight like sheep to our natural destiny.”
“But—that is fatalism.”
“No, not fatalism: insight into temperament. Fatalists believe that your life is arranged for you beforehand from without; willy-nilly, you MUST act so. I only believe that in this jostling world your life is mostly determined by your own character, in its interaction with the characters of those who surround you. Temperament works itself out. It is your own acts and deeds that make up Fate for you.”
For some months after this meeting neither Hilda Wade nor I