‘But you can’t,’ said Emily firmly and decisively.
‘Then I’ll run away.’
Emily pulled her down again on to the sofa.
‘That would be the silliest thing you could do. Where would you go?’
‘I can teach,’ said Elizabeth stubbornly.
‘No school would take in a woman who had run away from her husband.’
‘I could take my own name and leave Scotland.’
‘I thought you said you loved him?’
Elizabeth hid her face in her hands. There was a long silence.
Waves of self-reproach were rising higher and higher in Elizabeth, and the unspoken thing which had been struggling into consciousness was finally drowned.
‘I do love him; I do love him,’ she whispered. Without removing her hands she added: ‘I’ve been thinking all the time about his love for me, not about my love for him.’
Emily patted her shoulder and said nothing.
‘He’s miserable too,’ whispered Elizabeth. ‘He gets drunk nearly every night.’
After some minutes she sat up, with a bright eye, and looked at her friend:
‘I’ve been a bad wife, Emily. Thank you, very much, for clearing me up.’
‘What about some tea?’ said Emily briskly.
Elizabeth could not help laughing.
‘All crises in women’s lives seem to be punctuated by cups of tea,’ she said.
Later that evening Emily sat on the rug by her husband’s knee and told him about her successful management of Elizabeth: ‘Don’t you think I was right?’
The doctor in his thin voice said: ‘You should have told her to have a baby.’
‘So I did, after we had tea. I told her a baby was a wonderful thing for making a man human. Aha!’
She pinched the calf of his leg.
‘I suppose,’ said the doctor, ‘you didn’t think of asking her how they got on in bed?’
‘She’d have been dreadfully shocked if I had. Besides – I shouldn’t think there would be any difficulty there – her husband’s a Shand.’
‘Their reaction times may be different,’ said the doctor.
‘Jim,’ said his wife, ‘what a wee devil you are!’
TEN
Elizabeth had yielded herself to the stream of traditional wifehood, and the boat of her soul no longer rocked. She had but one course to follow – to devote herself to her husband, to love him selflessly, exacting nothing and giving much. She had been a bad wife, and now, God helping her, she would be a good wife.
A cynical observer might have remarked that she was now inflating with sentimentality her own image instead of Hector’s and setting it up in the role of Noble Wife. Yet these wind-blown puppets of our imagination play more than visionary parts in the drama of the soul, and have the advantage of being able to collapse suddenly when the need for them is over. Elizabeth, hidden within the self-made figure of the Noble Wife, was shielded for the time from social disapproval as effectively as a pneumatic tyre is shielded from the bumps of a hard road. Moreover, she now presented the comforting appearance that Hector expected of her.
She must have known this instinctively, for she first bathed and powdered her face, and then put on her prettiest frock. In Calderwick at that time it was considered slightly improper to powder one’s face by day, but Elizabeth excused her daring by reflecting that darkness had already set in, although it was not yet five o’clock. She inspected herself in the glass and added a string of coloured beads, signs of dawning femininity which might have pleased her sister-in- law.
She then put on a hat and coat and left the house with a quick, firm step. She could not wait for Hector; she was going to the office to bring him home. This time she would not burst into tears when she saw him. No wonder he got fed up, she told herself; any man would be fed up with a wife whose nose was always blobby.
The image of the Noble Wife was growing rapidly in size. Unconsciously, without words, Elizabeth was adding to the number of its attributes.
The perfect wife was not only selfless and loving – she was sympathetic, understanding, tactful and, above all, charming…. She must always be pretty – no, not pretty, Elizabeth did not aspire to prettiness – she must always look ‘nice’. The frou-frou of femininity was beginning to rustle round Elizabeth. Here, too, was the cloak of charity which should cover her husband’s many sins, while her devoted love sustained and comforted him…. Elizabeth was not far from the final dogma that woman exists for the sake of man. She was going beyond her teacher, Emily Scrymgeour, who believed only that woman should pretend to exist for the sake of man.
There is, however, a keen ecstasy in renunciation. We must not pity Elizabeth as she makes her way upstairs to the inner office of John Shand & Sons; she is transfigured by happiness. All the doubts that have vexed her for the past few months appear now as selfish hesitations: she feels that in spite of herself she has been miraculously led from one stepping-stone to another until she has emerged from the fog of uncertainty to find herself safely across the Rubicon in the full sunshine of wifehood.
Some of that sunshine was needed in the inner room where Hector was still sitting at his desk. He was alone: John had been out all day at the farmers’ mart, for it was a Friday, the weekly market-day of Calderwick. The outer office was empty, except for Mason, the head clerk, who was nervously hovering about his desk, and peeping every now and then through the glass partition to see if Mr Hector wasn’t thinking yet of going home. Mason had never known the junior partner to sit so long in the office.
For hours Hector had been humped over his desk in listless depression, drawing lines and diagrams on a bit of paper. He had put in what he called ‘a thick week’, and the defiant recklessness that had carried him along was now ebbing away, leaving behind it disgust and staleness. There were heavy black pouches under his eyes, and his mouth was drawn tight as if he were afraid it would fall out of control were he to open it. One could almost see the inchoate sagging outline of the form that might be his at the age of fifty, the ghost of the father, Charlie Shand, horribly incarnate in the flesh of the son.
Whether this illusion of Charlie Shand’s presence was the cause or the effect of Hector’s thoughts it is impossible to say. His father was haunting him. He was going the same way as the old man, he thought, jabbing furiously at the paper: drink and women, drink and women; and he would end in the same way. Might as well be dead. He saw himself again lying on a bier in a place that looked like a church.
That might be the best thing for all concerned. He was sick of everybody and sick of himself. Might as well be dead as feel dead.
He hadn’t a dog’s chance in Calderwick. The place was too full of his father…. He shuddered and shut his mouth more tightly than ever, while he drew aimless little pictures down the side of the paper. Then he set to work drawing a ship, a child’s ship, with masts and sails growing out of a rudely sketched hull. He became absorbed in it, and after he had finished the sails he put in a solitary figure in the bows, and then printed a name on the stern, ELSA. Elsa? There was another queer word struggling in the back of his mind, Koben, Kjobben something, and a doubling, a thickening of shadowy images, as if he were retracing some experience he had had before….
His mouth fell open. He had seen the ship Elsa in the harbour, with foreign fellows jabbering along her deck, and from that day to this he had not thought of her until his pen had printed the name. The rope curling on the quay beside him…. Better to drown in the open sea than in a stagnant dock….
He sat motionless for a while, with a new feeling springing up within him, a feeling faintly