Read Ebook: The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life by Gibbs Philip

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The mother-in-law, in the corner of the sitting-room, watches the drama of the married life, and with more experience of life, because of her years, sees the young wife do foolish things, watches her blundering experiments in the great adventure of marriage, is vigilant of her failures in housekeeping, and in the management of her husband. She cannot be quite tongue-tied. She cannot refrain from criticism, advice, rebuke. Between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law there is a daily warfare of pinpricks, a feud that grows bitter with the years.

But the mother-in-law is helpless. She cannot escape from the lamentable situation. She must always remain a hindrance, because she needs a roof over her head, and there is no other roof, and she is dependent for her daily bread upon the son who is faithful to her, though he is irritable, moody and sharp of speech, because of the fretfulness of his wife.

This is the eternal tragedy of the mother-in-law, which is turned into a jest by the red-nosed comedian to get the laughter from "the gods." It is also a tragedy to the daughter-in-law, who could shriek aloud sometimes when the presence of the elderly woman becomes intolerable.

Many things are becoming intolerable to the young wife. Her nerves are out of order. Sometimes she feels "queer." She cannot explain how queer she feels, even to herself. She says bitter things to her husband, and then hates herself for doing so. She has a great yearning for his love, but is very cold when he is in a tender mood. She cannot understand her own moods. She only knows that she is beginning to get frightened when she thinks of the long vista of years before her. She cannot go on like this always. She cannot go on like this very long. She is getting rather hysterical. She startles her husband by laughing in a queer shrill way when he expresses some serious opinions, or gives vent to some of his conventional philosophy, about women, and the duties of married life, and the abomination of the Suffragettes. But he does not see her tears. He does not see her one day, when suddenly, after she has been reading a Mudie's novel, page after page, without understanding one word, tears well up into her eyes, and fall upon the pages, until she bends her head down and puts her hands up to her face, and sobs as though all her heart had turned to tears.

So the husband has on one side the passing suspicion that something is wrong with his wife, and the wife hides her heart from him.

She is haunted with ghosts; the ghosts of What-Might-Have-Been. They whisper about her, so that she puts her hands to her ears, when she is alone in her drawing-room. Faces peer at her, with mocking eyes, or with tempting eyes--the faces of men who might have been her lovers, baby faces of unborn children. Little hands flutter about her heart, pluck at her, tease her. The ghosts of her girlhood crowd about her, the ghosts of dead hopes, of young illusions, of romantic dreams. She thrusts them away from her vision. She puts her hands before her eyes, and moans a little, quietly, so that the servants in the kitchen shall not hear.

She is assailed by strange temptations, horrible temptations, from which she shrinks back afraid. This hunger and thirst in her soul are so tormenting that she has frightful cravings for Something to satisfy her hunger and quench her thirst. She is tempted to take to drink, or to drugs, to dull the throbbing of her brain, to wake her up out of this awful lassitude, to give her a momentary excitement and vitality, and then--forgetfulness. She must have some kind of excitement--to break the awful monotony of her life, this intolerable dullness of her little home. If only an adventure would come to her! Some thrilling, perilous adventure, however wicked, whatever the consequences. She feels the overmastering need of some passionate emotion. She would like to plunge into romantic love again, to be set on fire by it. Somewhere about the world is a man who could save her, some strong man with a masterful way with him, brutal as well as tender, cruel as well as kind, who would come to her, and clasp her hands, and capture her. She would lean upon him. She would yield, willingly.... She tries to crush down these thoughts. She is horrified at the evil in them. Oh, she is a bad woman! Even in her loneliness her face scorches with shame. She gives a faint cry to God to save her. But again and again the devilish thoughts leer up in her brain. She begins to believe that the devil is really busy with her and that she cannot escape him.

In this Eighth Year she is in a state bordering on hysteria, when anything may happen to her. Even her husband is beginning to get alarmed. He is at last awakened out of his self-complacency. He is beginning to watch her, with a vague uneasiness. Why does she look so queerly at him sometimes as though she hated him? Why does she say such bitter, cruel, satirical things, which stab him and leave a poison in the wound? Why does she get into such passionate rages about trivial things, and then reveal a passionate remorse? Why does she sink into long silences, sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the pattern on the carpet, as though it had put a spell upon her? He cannot understand. She says there is nothing wrong with her health, she refuses to see a doctor. She scoffs at the idea of going away for a little holiday to the seaside. She says it would bore her to death. Once she bursts into tears and weeps on his shoulder. But she cannot, or will not, explain the cause of her tears, so that he becomes impatient with her and talks to her roughly, though he is sorry afterwards. He begins to see now that marriage is a difficult game. Perhaps they were not suited to each other. They married too young, before they had understood each other.... However they have got to make the best of it now. That is the law of life--to make the best of it.

So in the Eighth Year the husband tries to take a common-sense view of things, not knowing that in the Eighth Year it is too late for common sense as far as the wife is concerned. She wants uncommon sense. Only some tremendous and extraordinary influence, spiritual, or moral, or intellectual, beyond the limits of ordinary common sense, may save her from the perils in her own heart. She must find a way of escape, for these unsatisfied yearnings, for this beating heart, for this throbbing brain. Her little home has become a cage to her. Her husband has become her jailer. Her life has become too narrow, too petty, too futile. In the Eighth Year she must find a way of escape--anyhow, anywhere. And in the Eighth Year the one great question is in what direction will she go? There are many ways of escape.

One way of escape is through the door of the Divorce Court. Sir Francis Jeune, when he was President of the Divorce Court, saw before him many of these escaping women, and he noted down the fact about the Eighth Year; and sitting there with an impassive face, but watchful eyes, he saw the characters in all these little tragedies and came to know the type and the plot from constant reiteration. Sometimes the plot varied, but only in accidentals, never in essentials. As the story was rehearsed before him, it always began in the same way, with a happy year or two of marriage. Then it was followed by the first stress and strain. Then there came the drifting apart, the little naggings, the quarrels, the misunderstandings, until the wife--it was generally the wife--became bored, lonely, emotional, hysterical, and an easy victim for the first fellow with a roving eye, a smooth tongue, and an easy conscience. The procession still goes on, the long procession of women who try to escape through the Divorce Court door. Every year they come, and the same story is told and retold with sickening repetition. In most cases they are childless wives. That is proved, beyond dispute, by all statistics of divorce. Sometimes they have one or two children, but those cases are much more rare. But even when there are children to complicate the issues and to be the heirs of these tragedies, the causes behind the tragedies are the same. The woman has had idle hands in her lap before the Eighth Year of marriage has been reached. In the early years her little home was enough to satisfy her mind and heart, and her interests were enough to keep her busy. The coming of the first child, and of the second, if there is a second, was for a time sufficient to crowd her day with little duties and to prevent any restlessness or any deadly boredom. All went well while she had but one maidservant, and while her husband's feet were still on the lower rungs of the ladder. But the trouble began with the arrival of the extra servant and with the promotion of her husband. It began when gradually she handed over domestic duties to paid people, when she was seldom in the kitchen and more in the drawing-room, when the children were put under the charge of a nurse, and when the responsibilities of motherhood had become a sinecure. The fact must be faced that a child is not always a cure for the emptiness of a woman's heart, nor an absolute pledge of fidelity between husband and wife. These women who seek a way of escape from their little homes are not always brought to that position by the unfulfilled instincts of motherhood. For many of them have no instincts of motherhood. They feel no great natural desire to have a child. They even shrink from the idea of motherhood, and plead their lack of courage, their ill-health, their weakness. With their husbands they are partners in a childless scheme, or if they have a child--they quickly thrust it into the nursery to leave themselves free.

But, on the other hand, it is a fact borne out by all the figures that a child does in the vast majority of cases bind together the husband and wife, as no other influence or moral restraint; and that among all the women who come to the Divorce Court the overwhelming majority is made up of childless wives.

She does not resist. And yet by yielding she does not gain that happiness to which she stretched out her hands. She does not satisfy the great hunger in her heart or quench her burning thirst. She has not even killed the ghosts which haunt her, or healed the pin pricks of her conscience. Her conscience is one great bleeding wound. For this woman of the middle-classes is a creature of her caste Nor in most cases can she break the rules of her caste without frightful hurt to herself. She was brought up in a "nice" home. Her mother was a woman of old-fashioned virtues. Her father was a man who would have seen her dead rather than shamed. She received a High School education, and read Tennyson and Longfellow with moral notes by her class-mistress. She used to go to church, and sometimes goes there still, though without any fervor or strength of faith. She has heard the old words, "The wages of sin is death," and she shrinks a little when she thinks of them. Above all she has been brought up on romantic fiction, and that is always on the side of the angels. The modern problem novel has arrested her intellect, has startled her, challenged her, given her "notions"; but in her heart of hearts she still believes in the old-fashioned code of morals, in the sweet old virtues. This sin of hers is a great terror to her. She is not brazen-faced. She does not justify it by any advanced philosophy. She is just a poor, weak, silly woman, who has gone to the edge of a precipice, grown giddy, and fallen off the cliff. She throws up her hands with a great cry. The way of escape through the Divorce Court door is not a way to happiness. It is a way to remorse, to secret agonies, to a life-long wretchedness. Her second husband, if he "plays the game" according to the rules of the world, is not to be envied. Between him and this woman there are old ghosts. This way of escape is into a haunted house.

Thousands, and tens of thousands of women who pass through the Eighth Year, not unscathed, find another way out. They are finding it now through this new femininist movement which is linked up with the cause of Women's Suffrage. The Eighth Year produces many suffragettes, militant and otherwise. At first, in the first years of their married life, they scoffed at the idea of Votes for Women. They could not see the sense of it. They hated the vulgarities of the business, the shamelessness of it, the ugly squalor of these scuffles with the police, these fights with the crowds, these raids on the House of Commons. It was opposed to all their ideals of femininity and to all their traditions of girlhood. "The hussies ought to be whipped," is the verdict of the young wife in the first stage of her romantic affection. But, later on, when romance has worn very threadbare in the little home, when reality is beginning to poke its head through the drawing-room windows, she finds herself taking an interest in this strange manifestation which seems to be inspired by some kind of madness. She is silent now when some new phase in the conflict is being discussed in her presence. She listens and ponders. Presently she goes out of her way to get introduced to some suffrage woman on the outskirts of her acquaintance. She is surprised to find her a wonderfully cheerful, and apparently sane, woman, very keen, very alert, and with a great sense of humor--utterly unlike her tired, bored and melancholy self. Perhaps she is quite a young woman, a bachelor girl, earning her own living, down in Chelsea, or as a typist secretary in the City. But young as she is she has dived into all sorts of queer studies--the relations between men and women, the divorce laws, the science of eugenics--and she discusses them with an amazing frankness, and in a most revolutionary spirit, startling, and a little appalling, at first to this wife in her Eighth Year. She has made up her mind conclusively on all the great questions of life. She pooh-poohs romantic love. "There is too much fuss made about it," she says. "It is a mere episode, like influenza. There are bigger things." She holds herself perfectly free to choose her mate, and to remedy any little mistake which she may make in her choice. At present she prefers her independence and her own job, which she likes, thank you very much. She is tremendously enthusiastic about the work which women have got to do in the world, and there is nothing they cannot do, in her opinion. She claims an absolute equality with men. In fact, she is inclined to claim a superiority. After all, men are poor things.... Altogether she is a most remarkable young woman, and she seems to get tremendous fun out of life--and this wife in her Eighth Year, without agreeing with her yet envies her!

Or perhaps the wife meets a suffrage woman of middle-age. She, too, is a cheerful, keen, alert, bustling woman with cut-and-dried opinions on subjects about which the wife in the Eighth Year is full of doubt and perplexity. She has a certain hardness of character. She is intellectually hard, and without an atom of old-fashioned sentiment. She calls a spade a spade, in a rather embarrassing way, and prefers her facts to be naked. She is the mother of two children, whom she is bringing up on strictly eugenic principles, whatever those may be, and she is the wife of a husband whom she keeps in the background and treats as a negligible quantity. "We wives, my dear," she says, "have been too long kept prisoners in upholstered cages. It is time we broke our prison windows. I am breaking other people's windows as well. It lets in a lot of fresh air."

She talks a great deal about sweated labor, about the white-slave traffic, about women's work and wages. She talks still more about the treachery of the Government, the lies of politicians, the cowardice of men. "Oh, we are going to make them sit up. We shall stop at nothing. It is a revolution."

She sends round a lot of little pamphlets, full of dangerous ideas, ideas that sting like bees, ideas that are rather frightening to the wife in her Eighth Year. They refer to other books, which she gets out of the lending library. She reads Ibsen, and recognizes herself in many of those forlorn women in the plays. She reads small booklets on the Rights of Wives, on the Problems of Motherhood, on the Justice of the Vote. And suddenly, after a period of intellectual apathy, she is set on fire by all these burning sparks. She is caught up in a great flame of enthusiasm. It is like strong drink to her. It is like religious mania. She wakens out of her lethargy. Her feeling of boredom vanishes, gives way to a great excitement, a great exhilaration. She startles her husband, who thinks she has gone mad. She argues with him, laughs at his old-fashioned opinions, scoffs at him, pities him for his blindness. She goes out to suffrage meetings, starts to her feet one day and falters out a few excited words. She sits down with burning cheeks, with the sound of applause in her ears, like the roar of the sea. She learns to speak, to express herself coherently. She offers herself to "the cause." She sells her trinkets and gives the money to the funds. She is out for any kind of adventure, however perilous. She is one of the Hot Young Bloods, or if she has not the pluck for that, or the strength, one of the intellectual firebrands who are really more dangerous.

It is a queer business, this suffrage movement, which sets these women aflame. There are a few women in it who have the cold intellectual logic of John Stuart Mill himself. They have thought the thing out on scientific lines, in its economic, political, and social aspects. They want the vote honestly, as a weapon to give their sex greater power, greater independence, better conditions of life in the labor market. But the rank and file have no such intellectual purpose, though they make use of the same arguments and believe that these are the mainsprings of their actions. In reality they are Eighth Year women. That is to say, they seize upon the movement with a feverish desire to find in it some new motive in life, some tremendous excitement, some ideals greater and more thrilling than the little ideals of their home life. In this movement, in this great battle, they see many things which they keep secret. They go into it with blind impulses, which they do not understand, except vaguely. It is a movement of revolt against all the trammels of sex relationship which have come down through savagery to civilization; laws evolved out of the inherited experience of tribes and races for the protection of womanhood and the functions of womanhood, laws of repression, of restraint, for the sake of the children of the race; duties exacted by the social code again for the sake of the next generation. Having revolted against the duties of motherhood, all these laws, these trammels, these fetters, become to them intolerable, meaningless, exasperating. The scheme of monogamy breaks down. It has no deep moral purpose behind it, because the family is not complete. The scheme has been frustrated by the childlessness of the wife. Again, this movement is a revolt against the whole structure of modern society as it affects the woman--against the very architecture of the home; against all those tiny flats, those small suburban houses, in which women are cramped and confined, and cut off from the large world. It did not matter so long as there was a large world within the four walls. Their space was big enough to hold the big ideals of old-fashioned womanhood, in which the upbringing of children was foremost and all-absorbing. But for a woman who has lost these ideals and the duties that result from them, these little places are too narrow for their restless hearts; they become like prison cells, in which their spirits go pacing up and down, up and down, to come up against the walls, to heat their hands against them. They believe that they may find in this suffrage movement the key to the riddle of the mysteries in their souls, world-old mysteries, of yearnings for the Unknown Good, of cravings for the Eternal Satisfaction, for the perfect fulfilment of their beings. Their poor husband, a dear good fellow, after all, now that they look at him without hysteria, has not provided this Eternal Satisfaction. He has only provided pretty frocks, tickets for matin?es, foolish little luxuries. He does not stand for them as the Unknown Good. After the first year or two of marriage they know him with all his faults and flaws, and familiarity breeds contempt. But here, in this struggle for the Vote, in these window-breakings and house-burnings, in imprisonments and forcible feedings, in this solidarity of women inspired by a fierce fanaticism--there is, they think, the answer to all their unsolved questions, the splendor and the glory of their sex, the possibility of magnificent promises and gifts, in which the soul of woman may at last find peace, and her body its liberty. She is to have the supreme mastery over her own spirit and flesh.

It is a fine promise. But as yet it is unfulfilled. It is not to be denied that for a time at least some of these women do gain a cheerfulness, a keenness, a vitality, which seem to be a great recompense for their struggles and strivings. But they are the younger women, and especially the young unmarried women, who get a good deal of fun out of all this excitement, all this adventure, all the dangerous defiance of law and convention. The older women--many of them--are already suffering a sad disillusionment. They have not yet found those splendid things which seemed at last within their grasp. They are desperate to get them, fierce in their desire for them, but the cup of wine is withheld from their lips. They find themselves growing old and still unsatisfied, growing hard, and' bitter, and revengeful against those who thwart them. The problems of their sex still remain with them. They may break all the laws, but get no nearer to liberty. They are still prisoners of fate, bond-slaves to a nature which they do not understand. The femininist movement is only a temporary way of escape for the wife who has reached her crisis in the Eighth Year.

There is another way, and it has many doors. It is religion. Many of these women "take to religion" as they take to the suffrage movement, and find the same emotional excitement and adventure in it. They are caught up in it as by a burning flame. It satisfies something of their yearnings and desires. And it is a curious and lamentable thing that although it has been proved conclusively by all masters of philosophy and by all great thinkers, that some form of religion, is an essential need in the heart of women, the whole tendency of the time is to rob them of this spiritual guidance and comfort. Religion is not a part of the social scheme of things in "intellectual mansions" and in the small suburban houses of the professional classes. It is not entirely wiped off the slate, but it is regarded with indifference and as of no vital account in the sum of daily life. Occasionally a certain homage is paid to it, as to a pleasant, old-fashioned ritual which belongs to the code of "good form." In their courting days the young man and woman went to church now and then on a Sunday morning or a Sunday evening and held the same hymn-book, and enjoyed a little spiritual sentiment. They were married in church to the music of the Wedding March played by the organist. Sometimes as the years pass they drop into a service where there is good singing, a popular preacher, and a fashionable congregation. They regard themselves as Christians, and condescend to acknowledge the existence of God, in a vague, tolerant kind of way. But they do not enter into any intimate relations with God. He is not down on their visiting list. Many of them do not even go as far as those people I have described who regard God as part of the social code of "good form." They become frankly agnostic and smile at their neighbors who put on top-hats and silk dresses and stroll to church on a Sunday morning. It seems to them absurdly "Early Victorian." For they have read a great number of little books by the latest writers, who publish their philosophy in sevenpenny editions, and they have reached an intellectual position when they have a smattering of knowledge on the subject of evolution, anthropology, the origins of religion, literature and dogma, and the higher criticism. They have also read extracts from the works of Nietzsche, Kant, and the great free-thinkers, or reviews of their works in the halfpenny newspapers. The ideas of the great thinkers and great rebels have filtered down to them through the writings of little thinkers and little rebels. They have been amused by the audacities of Bernard Shaw and other intellectuals of their own age. They have read the novels of H. G. Wells, which seem to put God in His right place. They have imbibed unconsciously the atmosphere of free-thought and religious indifference which comes through the open windows, through the keyholes, through every nook and cranny. Occasionally the husband lays down the law on the subject with dogmatic agnosticism, or dismisses the whole business of religion with a laugh as a matter of no importance either way, certainly as a problem not worth bothering about.

So the wife's spiritual nature is starved. She is not even conscious of it, except just now and then when she is aware of a kind of spiritual hunger, or when she has little thoughts of terror at the idea of death, or when she is in low spirits. She has no firm and certain faith to which she can cling in moments of perplexity. She has no belief in any divine authority from which she can seek guidance for her actions. There is no supernatural influence about her from which she can draw any sweetness of consolation, when the drudgery and monotony of life begins to pall on her. When temptations come she has no anchor holding her fast to duty and honor. She has no tremendous ideals giving a large meaning to the little things of life. She has no spiritual vision to explain the mysteries of her own heart, or any spiritual balm to ease its pain and restlessness. She must rely always on her common sense, on her own experience, on her own poor little principles of what is right or wrong, or expedient, or "the proper thing." When those fail her, all fails; she is helpless, like a ship without a rudder, like a straw in the eddy of a mill race.

It is just at this time, when all has failed her, and when she seems to be drifting helplessly, that she is ready for religion, a bundle of dry straw which will burst into flame at the touch of a spark, a spiritual appetite hungry for food. In hundreds of cases these women take to the queerest kinds of spiritual food, some of it very poisonous stuff. Any impostor with a new creed may get hold of them. Any false prophet may dupe them into allegiance. They get into the hands of peculiar people. They are tempted to go to a spiritualistic s?ance and listen to the jargon of spiritualism. It frightens them at first, but after their first fears, and a little shrinking horror, they go forward into these "mysteries," and are obsessed by them. It appears they are "psychical." Undoubtedly after a little practice they could get into touch with the spirit-world. With planchette and table-rapping, and with mediumistic guidance, they may learn the secrets of the ghost-world, and invoke the aid of spirits in their little household. It becomes a mania with them. It becomes, in many cases, sheer madness.

There are other women who seek their spiritual salvation among the clairvoyants and crystal-gazers and palmists of the West End.

It is better for them if they can grope their way back to the old Christian faith, with its sweetness and serenity and divine ideals. Here at last the woman may find authority, not to be argued about, not to be dodged, but to be obeyed. Here at last she may find tremendous ideals giving a significance to the little things of life, which seemed so trivial, so futile, and so purposeless. Here is wholesome food for her spiritual hunger, giving her new strength and courage, patience and resignation. Here are great moral lessons from which she may draw wisdom and guidance for her own poor perplexities. Then when temptations come, she may cling to an anchor of faith which will not slip in shifting sands, but is chained to a great rock. The wisdom of the Church, the accumulated experience stored up in the Church, the sweetness of all great Christian lives, the splendid serenity of the Christian laws, so stern and yet so tolerant, so hard and yet so easy, give to this woman's soul the peace she has desired, not to be found among the ghosts of modern spiritualism, nor in the pseudo-scientific jargon of Mrs. Eddy's works, nor in the glass-crystals of the clairvoyants. For the Christian faith has no use for hysteria; it exacts a healthy discipline of mind. It demands obedience to the laws of life, by which no woman may shirk the duties of her nature, or pander to her selfishness, or dodge the responsibilities of her state as a wife, or forget her marriage-vows and all that they involve.

There would be no fatal significance about the Eighth Year if the old religion were still of vital influence in the home. For after all, in spite of all our cleverness, we have not yet discovered any new intellectual formula or philosophy which will force men and women to do those things which are unpleasant but necessary to insure the future of the race; to deny themselves so that the future generation may gain; to suffer willingly in this world for the sake of an advantage in a future life. If people do not believe in a future life, and in such rewards as are offered by the Christian dogma, they prefer to have their advantages here and now. But as we know, if we face the facts of life clearly, the advantages, here and now, are not easy to get. Life, at its best, is a disappointing business. There is a lot of rough with the smooth, especially for women, especially for those women of the middle-classes in small suburban homes, over-intel-lectualized, with highly strung nerves, in a narrow environment, without many interests, and without much work. It is just because many of them are entirely without religion to give some great purpose to their inevitable trivialities that their moral perspective becomes hopelessly inverted, as though they were gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. Having no banking account in the next life, they spend themselves in this life, and live "on tick," as it were. Religion is the gospel of unselfishness. Lacking religion, they are utterly selfish. They do not worry about the future of the race. Why should they? All they are worrying about is to save themselves pain, expense, drudgery. Children are a great nuisance--therefore they will not have children. They want to put in a good time, to enjoy youth and beauty as long as possible, to get as much fun as they can here and now. But, as we have seen, the fun begins to peter out somewhere about the Eighth Year, and "the good time" has disappeared like a mirage when one gets close to it, and even youth and beauty are drooping and faded like yesterday's flowers. What is the woman to do then? She is the victim of shattered illusions, of broken hopes. Before her is nothing but a gray vista of years. She has nothing to reconcile her with the boredom of her days, nothing to compensate her for domestic drudgery, no cure for the restlessness and feverishness which consume her, no laws by which she may keep straight. She sees crookedly, her spirit rushes about hither and thither. She is like a hunted thing, hunted by her desires, and she can find no sanctuary; no sanctuary unless she finds religion, and the right religion. There are not many women nowadays who find this way of escape, for religion has gone out of fashion, like last year's hats, and it wants a lot of pluck to wear a last year's hat.

Besides, the husband does not like it. He discourages religion, except in homoeopathic doses, taken by way of a little tonic, as one goes to the theatre for a pick-me-up. As he remarks, he does not believe in women being too spiritual. It is not "healthy." If his wife goes to church with any regularity he suspects there is an attractive cleric round the corner. And sometimes he is right. Anyhow, he does not feel the need of religion, except when he gets a pretty bad dose of influenza and has an uneasy thought that he is going to "peg out." As a rule he enjoys good health, and has no time to bother about the supernatural. He does not meet it in the city. It is not a marketable commodity. It is not, as he says, "in his line of country." He does not see why it should be in his wife's line of country. He is annoyed when his wife takes up any of these cranky ideas. He rages inwardly when she takes them up passionately. Why can't she be normal?

Why on earth can't she go on as she began, with her little feminine interests, keeping herself pretty for his sake, keen on the latest fashions, neighborly with young wives like herself, and fond of a bit of frivolity now and then? When she complains that she has idle hands in her lap, and wants something to do, he reminds her that she found plenty to do in the first years of her married life. When she cries out that she is bored, he points out to her that she gets much more amusement than he does.

And that is true, because by the time he has reached the Eighth Year he is pretty busy. Ambition has caught hold of him and he is making a career. It is not easy. Competition is deadly. He has got his work cut out to keep abreast with his competitors. It is a constant struggle "to keep his end up." He finds it disconcerting when he comes home in the evenings after the anxiety of his days, dog-tired and needing sympathy, to find that his wife has an attack of nerves, or a feverish desire to go out and "see something." He wants to stay at home and rest, to dawdle over the evening paper, to listen to a tune or two from his wife.

There are moments when the man hears the call of the wild, and loathes respectability and conventionality with a deadly loathing. In his heart, as in the heart of every man, there is a little Bohemia, a little country of lawlessness and errant fancy and primitive desires. Sometimes when he has shut himself up in his study, when the servants are in the kitchen washing up the supper-things, when his wife is lying down with a bad headache, he unlocks the door of that Bohemia in his heart, and his imagination goes roving, and he hears the pan-pipes calling, and the stamp of the cloven hoofs of the old Nature-god. He would like to cut and run sometimes from this respectable life of his, to go in search of adventure down forbidden pathways, and to find the joy of life again in Liberty Hall. This fretful wife of his, this social-ladder climbing, the whole business of "playing the game" in the same old way, makes him very tired, and gets on his nerves at times most damnably. He has his temptations. He hears siren voices calling him. He sees the lure of the witch-women. To feel his pulse thrill to the wine of life, to get the fever of joy in his blood again, to plunge into the fiery lake of passion, are temptations from which he does not escape because he is Something in the City, or a barrister-at-law, and a married man with a delicate wife. But, being a man, with a man's work, and a man's ambition, he keeps his sanity, and quite often his self-respect. His eyes are clear enough to see the notice-boards on the boundary lines of the forbidden territory, "Trespassers will be prosecuted," "Please keep off the grass," "No thoroughfare." He locks up the gate to the little Bohemia in his heart, and puts the key into a secret cupboard of his brain. He understands quite clearly that if he once "goes off the rails," as he calls it, his ambitions will be frustrated and his career spoiled. Besides, being a conventionalist and somewhat of a snob, he would hate to be found out in any violation of the social code, and his blood runs cold at the idea of his making a fool of himself with a woman, or anything of that kind. The creed of his social code, of the pot-hatted civilization, of this suburban conventionality of these little private snob-doms, is stronger in the man than in the woman. When she once takes the bit between her teeth, as it were, she becomes utterly lawless. But the man reins himself in more easily. He finds it on the whole less difficult to be law-abiding. He has also a clearer vision of the logic of things. He knows that certain results follow certain causes. He can measure up the consequences of an act, and weigh them. He is guided by his brain rather than by his emotions. He has certain fixed principles deeply rooted in him. He has a more delicate sense of honor than most women. It is summed up in that old school-phrase of his--"playing the game." However much his nerves may be jangled, and goodness knows they are often jangled, especially as the Eighth Year draws near, he is generally master of himself. At least he does not, as a rule, have hysterical outbursts, or give rein to passionate impulses, or suddenly take some wild plunge, upsetting all the balance of his life. He does not take frightful risks, as a woman will always take them, recklessly, when she reaches her crisis.

So it is that he looks coldly upon his wife's desires for some new emotional activity, of whatever kind it may be, religious, political, or ethical. He hates any symptoms of fanaticism. He shivers at any breach of good form. He would like her always to be sitting in the drawing-room when he comes home, in a pretty frock, with a novel in her lap, with a smile in her eyes. He does not and will not understand that this childless wife of his must have strong interests outside her little home to save her from eating her heart out. He hides from himself the fact that her childlessness is a curse which is blighting her. He pooh-poohs her tragic cry for help. He is just a little brutal with her when she accuses him of thwarting all the desires of her soul. And he is scared, thoroughly scared, when at last she takes flight, on wild wings, to some spiritual country, or to some moral, or immoral, territory, where he could not follow. He tries to call her back. But sometimes she may not be called back. She has escaped beyond the reach of his voice.

Snobbishness is one of the causes which lead to the Eighth Year, and not the least among them. It is an essentially middle-class snobbishness, and has grown up, like a fungus growth, with that immense and increasing class of small, fairly well-to-do households who have come into being with the advance of material prosperity during the past twenty-five years, and with the progress of elementary education, and all that it has brought with it in the form of new desires for pleasure, amusement and more luxuries. These young husbands and wives who set up their little homes are not, as I have said, content to start on the same level as their parents in the first years of their married life. They must start at least on the level of their parents at the end of their married life, even a little in advance. The seeds of snobbishness are sown before marriage. The modern son pooh-poohs the habits of his old-fashioned father. They are not good enough for him. He has at least twice the pocket-money at school compared with the allowance of his father when he was a boy. He goes to a more expensive school and learns expensive habits. When he begins work he does not hand over most of his salary as his father used to hand over his salary a generation ago, to keep the family pot boiling. He keeps all that he earns, though he is still living at home, and develops a nice taste in clothes. One tie on week-days and another tie for Sundays are still good enough for the father, but the son buys ties by the dozen, and then has a passion for fancy socks, and lets his imagination rove into all departments of haberdashery. He is only a middle-class young man, but he dresses in the style of a man of fashion, adopts some of the pleasures of the man about town, and is rather scornful of the little house in the suburbs to which he returns after a bachelor's dinner in a smart restaurant, or after a tea-party with gaiety girls. He becomes a "Nut," and his evenings are devoted to a variety of amusements, which does away with a good deal of money. He smokes a special brand of cigarettes. He hires a motor-car occasionally for a spin down to Brighton. His mother and father are rather scared by this son who lives in a style utterly beyond their means.

The girl is a feminine type of the new style. She has adopted the new notions. At a very early age she is expert in all the arts of the younger generation, and at seventeen or eighteen has already revolted from the authority of her parents. She is quite a nice girl, naturally, but her chief vice is vanity. She is eaten up with it. It is a consuming passion. From the moment she gets out of bed in the morning for the first glimpse of her face in the looking-glass to the time she goes to bed after putting on some lip-salve and face enamel, she is absorbed with self-consciousness about her "looks." Her face is always occupying her attention. Even in railway trains she keeps biting her lips to make them red. At every window she passes she gives a sidelong glance to see if her face is getting on all right. Her main ambition in life is to be in the fashion. She is greedy for "pretty things" and sponges upon her father and mother for the wherewithal to buy them, and she will not lay a little finger on any work in the kitchen or even make a bed, lest her hands should be roughened and because it would not be quite "lady-like."

A pretty education for matrimony! A nice couple to set up house together Poor children of life, they are doomed to have a pack of troubles. Because as they began they go on, with the same ideas, with the same habits of mind, until they get a rude shock. Their little household is a shrine to the great god Snob. They are his worshippers. To make a show beyond their meansj or up to the very limit of their means, to pretend to be better off than they are, to hide any sign of poverty, to dress above their rank in life, to show themselves in places of entertainment, to shirk domestic drudgery, that is their creed.

In the old days, before the problem of the Eighth Year had arrived, the wives of men, the mothers of those very girls, kept themselves busy by hundreds of small duties. They made the beds, dusted the rooms, helped the servants in the kitchen, made a good many of their own clothes, mended them, altered them, cleaned the silver. But nowadays the wife of the professional man does none of these things if there is any escape from them. She keeps one servant at a time when her mother did without a servant. She keeps two servants as soon as her husband can afford an extra one, three servants if the house is large enough to hold them. Indeed, a rise in the social scale is immediately the excuse for an additional servant, and in the social status the exact financial prosperity of the middle-classes is reckoned by them according to the number of servants they keep. And whether it be two or three, the little snob wife sits in her drawing-room with idle hands, trying to kill time, getting tired of doing nothing, but proud of her laziness. And the snob husband encourages her in her laziness. He is proud of it, too. He would hate to think of his wife dusting, or cleaning, or washing up. He does not guess that this worship of his great god Snob is a devil's worship, having devilish results for himself and her. The idea that women want work never enters his head. His whole ambition in life is to prevent his wife from working, not only when he is alive, but after he is dead. He insures himself heavily and at the cost of a great financial strain upon his resources in order that "if anything happens" his wife, even then, need not raise her little finger to do any work. But something "happens" before he is dead. The woman revolts from the evil spell of her laziness. She finds some work for her idle hands to do--good work or bad.

If only those idle women would find some good work to do the Eighth Year would lose its terrors. And there is so much good work to do if they would only lay their hands to it! If they cannot get in touch with God, they can at least get in touch with humanity. At their very doors there is a welter of suffering, struggling humanity craving for a little help, needing helping hands, on the very edge of the abyss of misery, and slipping down unless they get rescued in the nick of time. In the mean streets of life, in the hospitals, at the prison gates, in the reformatories, in the dark haunts of poverty, there are social workers striving and toiling and moiling in the service of all these seething masses of human beings. But there are too few of them, and the appeals for volunteers in the ranks of the unpaid helpers are not often answered. They are hardly ever answered from the class of women who have least in the world to do, and most need of such kinds of work. Many of these women have good voices. They sing little drawing-room ballads quite well, until they get sick of the sound of their own singing in their lonely little drawing-rooms. But they do not think of singing in the hospitals, and the workhouse wards, where their voices would give joy to suffering people, or miserable people who do not often hear the music of life. These women have no children. They have shirked the pains of childbirth. But they might help to give a little comfort and happiness to other mothers' children, to shepherd a small flock for a day's outing in the country, to organize the children's playtime, to nurse the sick baby now and then. These idle women remember their own girlhood and its dreams. They remember their own innocence, the shelter of their home-life. It would be good for them if they gave a little loving service to the girls in the working-quarters of the great cities, and went down into the girl-clubs to play their dance tunes, to keep them out of the streets, to give them a little innocent fun in the evenings. These lazy women cry out that they are prisoners in upholstered cages. But there are many prisoners in stone cells, who at the prison gates, on their release, stand looking out into the cold gray world, with blank, despairing eyes, with no prospect but that of crime and vice, unless some unknown friend comes with a little warmth of human love, with a quick sympathy and a ready helpfulness. Here is work for workless women who are well-to-do. They are unhappy in their own homes, because they are tired of its trivialities, tired of its little luxuries, bored to death with themselves because they have no purpose in life. But in the mean streets round the corner they would find women still clinging with extraordinary courage to homes that have no stick of furniture in them, amazingly cheerful, although instead of little luxuries they have not even the barest necessities of life, unwearied, indefatigable, heroic in endurance, though they toil on sweated wages. The women of the well-to-do middle-classes drift apart from their husbands because perhaps they have irritable little habits, because they do not understand all the yearnings in their wives' hearts, because they have fallen below the old ideals of their courting days. But here in the slums these women with a grievance would find other women loyal to their husbands who come home drunk at nights, loyal through thick and thin to husbands who "bash" them when they speak a sharp word, loyal to the death to husbands who are untamed brutes with only the love of the brute for its mate. There is no problem of the Eighth Year in Poverty Court, only the great problems of life and death, of hunger and thirst and cold, of labor and want of work. Here in the mean streets of the world is the great lesson that want of work is the greatest disaster, the greatest moral tragedy, that may happen to men and women.

If the idle women of the little snobdoms would come forth from their houses and flats, they would see that lesson staring them in the face, with a great warning to themselves. And if they would thrust aside their selfishness and learn the love of humanity, it would light a flame in their hearts which would kindle the dead ashes of their disillusionment and burn up their grievances, and make a bonfire of all their petty little troubles, and make such a light in their lives as would enable them to see the heroic qualities of ordinary duties bravely done, and of ordinary lives bravely led. Here they would find another way of escape from the perils of the Eighth Year, and a new moral health for their hearts and brains.

It is only now and then that some woman is lucky enough to find this way out, for snobbishness enchains them, and it is difficult to break its fetters.

And so they stare into each other's soul, and take hands again like little children, abandoned by the Wicked Uncles of life, and they grope their way back to primitive things, and begin the journey again. They have found out that this new comradeship is better even than the old romantic love of their courting days. They have discovered something of the great secret of life. They are humbled. They make new pledges to each other, pick up the broken pieces of their hopes and dreams and fit them together again in a new and sounder scheme. This time, in some cases, they do not leave the baby out of the business. The wife becomes a mother, and the child chases away all the ghosts which haunted her in the Eighth Year. She no longer wants to take flight. She has been called back.

It is nearly always some accident like this which calls the wife back, some sudden, startling change in the situation, caused by outside influences, or by the hand of Fate. Sometimes it is an illness which overtakes the husband or wife. Holding hands by the bedside, they stare into the face of Death, and again the trivialities of life, the pettiness of their previous desires, the folly of their selfishness, the stupidity of their little snobdom, are revealed by the whisperings of Death, and by its warnings. The truth of things stalks into the bedroom where the husband, or the wife, lies sleeping on the borderland. About the sick bed the weeping woman makes new vows, tears wash out her vanity, her self-conceit. Or, kneeling by the side of the woman whose transparent hand he clasps above the coverlet, the husband listens to the little voice within his conscience, and understands, with a great heartache, the pitiful meaning of the domestic strife which seemed to have killed his love for the woman for whose life now he makes a passionate cry. In the period of convalescence, after Death has stolen away, when life smiles again through the open windows, that man and woman get back to sanity and to wisdom beyond that of common-sense. They begin again with new ideals. Perhaps in a little while one of the rooms becomes a nursery. They get back to the joy of youth, once more the woman has been called back.

If none of these "accidents" happen, if some great influence like this does not thrust its way into the lives of this husband and wife during the crisis of the Eighth Year, if the woman is not caught up by some great enthusiasm, or if she can find no work for the idle hands to do, giving her new and absorbing interests to satisfy her heart and brain, then the Eighth Year is a fatal year, and the President of the Divorce Court has a new case added to his list, or the family records of the country chronicle another separation, or another woman goes to prison for arson or bomb-throwing. Because the laws of psychology are not so erratic as the world imagines. They work out on definite lines. Certain psychological forces having been set in motion, they lead inevitably to certain results. When once a woman has lost her interest in her home and husband, when she has become bored with herself, when she has a morbid craving for excitement and adventures, when she has become peevish and listless and hungry-hearted, she cannot remain in this condition. Those forces within her are tremendously powerful. They must find some outlet. They must reach a definite time of crisis when things have got to happen. These vague yearnings must be satisfied, somehow, anyhow. The emptiness of her heart must be filled by something or other. She will search round with wondering, wistful eyes, more desperate day by day, until she finds the thing, however evil it may be, however dangerous. She must still that throbbing brain of hers, even if she has to take drugs to do so. In spite of all the poison laws, she will find some kind of poison, some subtle and insidious drug to give her temporary cure, a period of vitality, a thrill of excitement, a glittering dream or two, a relief from the dulness which is pressing down upon her with leaden weights. She knows the penalty which follows this drug-taking--the awful reaction, the deadly lethargy that follows, the nervous crises, the loss of will-power, but she is prepared to pay the price because for a little while she gets peace, and artificial life. The family doctors know the prevalence of those drug-taking habits. They know the cause of them, they have watched the pitiful drama of these women's lives. But they can do nothing to cut out the cause. Not even the surgeon's knife can do that; their warnings fall on deaf ears, or are answered by a hysterical laugh.

As I have shown, there are other forms of drug-taking not less dangerous in their moral effects. If the woman does not go to the chemist's shop, she goes to the darkened room of the clairvoyant and the crystal-gazer, or to the spiritualistic s?ance, or to the man who hides his time until the crisis of the Eighth Year delivers the woman into his hands.

Here, then, frankly and in detail, I have set out the meaning of this dangerous year of married life, and have endeavored, honestly, to analyze all the social and psychological forces which go to make that crisis. It is, in some measure, a study of our modern conditions of life as they prevail among the middle-classes, so that the problem is not abnormal, but is present, to some extent, in hundreds of thousands of small households to-day. All the tendencies of the time, all the revolutionary ideas that are in the very air we breathe, all this modern spirit of revolt against disagreeable duties, and drudgery, and discipline, the decay of religious authority, the sapping of spiritual faith, the striving for social success, the cult of snobbishness, the new creed of selfishness which ignores the future of the race and demands a good time here and now, the lack of any ideals larger than private interests and personal comforts, the ignorance of men and women who call themselves intellectual, the nervous irritability of husbands and wives who live up to the last penny of their incomes, above all the childlessness of these women who live in small flats and suburban villas, and their utter laziness, all those signs and symptoms of our social sickness lead up, inevitably, and with fatal logic, to the tragedy of the Eighth Year.

PART II--A DEMONSTRATION

In the drawing-room of a flat in Intellectual Mansions, S. W., there was an air of quietude and peace. No one would have imagined for a moment that the atmosphere was charged with electricity, or that the scene was set for a drama of emotional interest with tragic potentialities. It seemed the dwelling-place of middle-class culture and well-to-do gentility.

The room was furnished in the "New Art" style, as seen in the showrooms of the great stores. There were sentimental pictures on the walls framed in dark oak. The sofa and chairs were covered in a rather flamboyant chintz. Through the French windows at the back could be seen the balcony railings, and, beyond, a bird's-eye view of the park. A piano-organ in the street below was playing the latest ragtime melody, and there was the noise of a great number of whistles calling for taxis, which did not seem to come.

In a stiff-backed arm-chair by the fireplace sat an elderly lady, of a somewhat austere appearance, who was examining through her spectacles the cover of a paper backed novel, depicting a voluptuous young woman; obviously displeasing to her sense of propriety. Mrs. Heywood's sense of propriety was somewhat acutely developed, to the annoyance, at times, of Mollie, the maid-servant, who was clearing away the tea-things in a bad temper. That is to say, she was making a great deal of unnecessary clatter.

Mrs. Heywood ignored the clatter, and concentrated her attention on the cover of the paper-backed book. It seemed to distress her, and presently she gave expression to her distress.

"Dear me! What an improper young woman!"

Mollie's bad temper was revealed by a sudden tightening of the lips and a flushed face. She bent across an "occasional" table and peered over the old lady's shoulder, and spoke rather impudently.

Molly tossed her head, so that her white cap assumed an acute angle.

"I was shocked to see that it had gone from the kitchen dresser."

Then she lowered her voice and added in a tone of bitter grievance--

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