Inspired by Francesca’s last budget, full of all sorts of revealing details of her daily life, I said to Himself at breakfast: “I am not going to paint this morning, nor am I going to ‘keep house’; I propose to write in my loose-leaf diary, and what is more I propose to write about marriage!”
When I mentioned to Himself the subject I intended to treat, he looked up in alarm.
“Don’t, I beg of you, Penelope,” he said. “If you do it the other two will follow suit. Women cannot discuss marriage without dragging in husbands, and MacDonald, La Touche, and I won’t have a leg to stand upon. The trouble with these ‘loose leaves’ that you three keep for ever in circulation is, that the cleverer they are the more publicity they get. Francesca probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina’s for your Current Events Club. In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that’s rather epigrammatic for a farmer at breakfast time.”
“I am not going to write about husbands,” I said, “least of all my own, but about marriage as an institution; the part it plays in the evolution of human beings.”
“Nevertheless, everything you say about it will reflect upon me,” argued Himself. “The only husband a woman knows is her own husband, and everything she thinks about marriage is gathered from her own experience.”
“Your attitude is not only timid, it is positively cowardly!” I exclaimed. “You are an excellent husband as husbands go, and I don’t consider that I have retrograded mentally or spiritually during our ten years of life together. It is true nothing has been said in private or public about any improvement in me due to your influence, but perhaps that is because the idea has got about that your head is easily turned by flattery.—Anyway, I shall be entirely impersonal in what I write. I shall say I believe in marriage because I cannot think of any better arrangement; also that I believe in marrying men because there is nothing else to marry. I shall also quote that feminist lecturer who said that the bitter business of every woman in the world is to convert a trap into a home. Of course I laughed inwardly, but my shoulders didn’t shake for two minutes as yours did. They were far more eloquent than any loose leaf from a diary; for they showed every other man in the audience that you didn’t consider that you had to set any ‘traps’ for me!”
Himself leaned back in his chair and gave way to unbridled mirth. When he could control his speech, he wiped the tears from his eyes and said offensively:—
“Well, I didn’t; did I?”
“No,” I replied, flinging the tea-cosy at his head, missing it, and breaking the oleander on the plant-shelf ten feet distant.
“You wouldn’t be unmarried for the world!” said Himself. “You couldn’t paint every day, you know you couldn’t; and where could you find anything so beautiful to paint as your own children unless you painted me; and it just occurs to me that you never paid me the compliment of asking me to sit for you.”
“I can’t paint men,” I objected. “They are too massive and rugged and ugly. Their noses are big and hard and their bones show through everywhere excepting when they are fat and then they are disgusting. Their eyes don’t shine, their hair is never beautiful, they have no dimples in their hands and elbows; you can’t see their mouths because of their moustaches, and generally it’s no loss; and their clothes are stiff and conventional with no colour, nor any flowing lines to paint.”
“I know where you keep your ‘properties,’ and I’ll make myself a mass of colour and flowing lines if you’ll try me,” Himself said meekly.
“No, dear,” I responded amiably. “You are very nice, but you are not a costume man, and I shudder to think what you would make of yourself if I allowed you to visit my property-room. If I ever have to paint you (not for pleasure, but as a punishment), you shall wear your everyday corduroys and I’ll surround you with the children; then you know perfectly well that the public will never notice you at all.” Whereupon I went to my studio built on the top of the long rambling New England shed and loved what I painted yesterday so much that I went on with it, finding that I had said to Himself almost all that I had in mind to say, about marriage as an institution.
We were finishing luncheon on the veranda with all out of doors to give us appetite. It was Buttercup Sunday, a yellow June one that had been preceded by Pussy Willow Sunday, Dandelion Sunday, Apple Blossom, Wild Iris, and Lilac Sunday, to be followed by Daisy and Black-Eyed Susan and White Clematis and Goldenrod and Wild Aster and Autumn Leaf Sundays.
Francie was walking over the green-sward with a bowl and spoon, just as our Scottish men friends used to do with oat-meal at breakfast time. The Sally-baby was blowing bubbles in her milk, and Himself and I were discussing a book lately received from London.
Suddenly I saw Billy, who had wandered from the table, sitting on the steps bending over a tiny bird’s egg in his open hand. I knew that he must have taken it from some low-hung nest, but taken it in innocence, for he looked at it with solicitude as an object of tender and fragile beauty. He had never given a thought to the mother’s days of patient brooding, nor that he was robbing the summer world of one bird’s flight and one bird’s song.
“Did you hear the whippoorwills singing last night, Daddy?” I asked.
“I did, indeed, and long before sunrise this morning. There must be a new family in our orchard, I think; but then we have coaxed hundreds of birds our way this spring by our little houses, our crumbs, and our drinking dishes.”
“Yes, we have never had so many since we came here to live. Look at that little brown bird flying about in the tall apple-tree, Francie; she seems to be in trouble.”
“P’r’haps it’s Mrs. Smiff’s wenomous cat,” exclaimed Francie, running to look for a particularly voracious animal that lived across the fields, but had been known to enter our bird-Eden.
“Hear this, Daddy; isn’t it pretty?” I said, taking up the “Life of Dorothy Grey.”
Billy pricked up his ears, for he can never see a book opened without running to join the circle, so eager he is not to lose a precious word.
“The wren sang early this morning” (I read slowly). “We talked about it at breakfast and how many people there were who would not be aware of it; and E. said, ‘Fancy, if God came in and said: “Did you notice my wren?” and they were obliged to say they had not known it was there!’”
Billy rose quietly and stole away behind the trees, returning in a few moments, empty-handed, to stand by my side.
“Does God know how many eggs there are in a bird’s nest, mother?” he asked.
“People have so many different ideas about what God sees and takes note of, that it’s hard to say, sonny. Of course you remember that the Bible says not one sparrow falls to the ground but He knows it.”
“The mother bird can’t count her eggs, can she, mother?”
“Oh! Billy, you do ask the hardest questions; ones that I can never answer by Yes and No! She broods her eggs all day and all night and never lets them get cold, so she must know, at any rate, that they are going to be birds, don’t you think? And of course she wouldn’t want to lose one; that’s the reason she’s so faithful!”