TOM'S HUSBAND
by Sarah Orne Jewett
I shall not dwell long upon the circumstances that led to the marriage
of my hero and heroine; though their courtship was, to them, the only
one that has ever noticeably approached the ideal, it had many aspects
in which it was entirely commonplace in other people's eyes. While the
world in general smiles at lovers with kindly approval and sympathy,
it refuses to be aware of the unprecedented delight which is amazing
to the lovers themselves.
But, as has been true in many other cases, when they were at last
married, the most ideal of situations was found to have been changed to
the most practical. Instead of having shared their original duties, and,
as school-boys would say, going halves, they discovered that the cares
of life had been doubled. This led to some distressing moments for both
our friends; they understood suddenly that instead of dwelling in heaven
they were still upon earth, and had made themselves slaves to new laws
and limitations. Instead of being freer and happier than ever before,
they had assumed new responsibilities; they had established a new
household, and must fulfill in some way or another the obligations of
it. They looked back with affection to their engagement; they had been
longing to have each other to themselves, apart from the world, but it
seemed that they never felt so keenly that they were still units in
modern society. Since Adam and Eve were in Paradise, before the devil
joined them, nobody has had a chance to imitate that unlucky couple.
In some respects they told the truth when, twenty times a day, they
said that life had never been so pleasant before; but there were
mental reservations on either side which might have subjected them
to the accusation of lying. Somehow, there was a little feeling of
disappointment, and they caught themselves wondering--though they would
have died sooner than confess it--whether they were quite so happy as
they had expected. The truth was, they were much happier than people
usually are, for they had an uncommon capacity for enjoyment. For a
little while they were like a sail-boat that is beating and has to drift
a few minutes before it can catch the wind and start off on the other
tack. And they had the same feeling, too, that any one is likely to
have who has been long pursuing some object of his ambition or desire.
Whether it is a coin, or a picture, or a stray volume of some old
edition of Shakespeare, or whether it is an office under government
or a lover, when fairly in one's grasp there is a loss of the eagerness
that was felt in pursuit. Satisfaction, even after one has dined well,
is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.
My hero and heroine were reasonably well established to begin with: they
each had some money, though Mr. Wilson had most. His father had at one
time been a rich man, but with the decline, a few years before, of
manufacturing interests, he had become, mostly through the fault of
others, somewhat involved; and at the time of his death his affairs were
in such a condition that it was still a question whether a very large
sum or a moderately large one would represent his estate. Mrs. Wilson,
Tom's step-mother, was somewhat of an invalid; she suffered severely
at times with asthma, but she was almost entirely relieved by living in
another part of the country. While her husband lived, she had accepted
her illness as inevitable, and rarely left home; but during the last few
years she had lived in Philadelphia with her own people, making short
and wheezing visits only from time to time, and had not undergone a
voluntary period of suffering since the occasion of Tom's marriage,
which she had entirely approved. She had a sufficient property of her
own, and she and Tom were independent of each other in that way. Her
only other stepchild was a daughter, who had married a navy officer,
and had at this time gone out to spend three years (or less) with
her husband, who had been ordered to Japan.
It is not unfrequently noticed that in many marriages one of the persons
who choose each other as partners for life is said to have thrown
himself or herself away, and the relatives and friends look on with
dismal forebodings and ill-concealed submission. In this case it was the
wife who might have done so much better, according to public opinion.
She did not think so herself, luckily, either before marriage or
afterward, and I do not think it occurred to her to picture to herself
the sort of career which would have been her alternative. She had been
an only child, and had usually taken her own way. Some one once said
that it was a great pity that she had not been obliged to work for her
living, for she had inherited a most uncommon business talent, and,
without being disreputably keen at a bargain, her insight into the
practical working of affairs was very clear and far-reaching. Her
father, who had also been a manufacturer, like Tom's, had often said it
had been a mistake that she was a girl instead of a boy. Such executive
ability as hers is often wasted in the more contracted sphere of
women, and is apt to be more a disadvantage than a help. She was too
independent and self-reliant for a wife; it would seem at first thought
that she needed a wife herself more than she did a husband. Most men
like best the women whose natures cling and appeal to theirs for
protection. But Tom Wilson, while he did not wish to be protected
himself, liked these very qualities in his wife which would have
displeased some other men; to tell the truth, he was very much in love
with his wife just as she was. He was a successful collector of almost
everything but money, and during a great part of his life he had
been an invalid, and he had grown, as he laughingly confessed, very
old-womanish. He had been badly lamed, when a boy, by being caught
in some machinery in his father's mill, near which he was idling one
afternoon, and though he had almost entirely outgrown the effect of his
injury, it had not been until after many years. He had been in college,
but his eyes had given out there, and he had been obliged to leave
in the middle of his junior year, though he had kept up a pleasant
intercourse with the members of his class, with whom he had been a great
favorite. He was a good deal of an idler in the world. I do not think
his ambition, except in the case of securing Mary Dunn for his wife,
had ever been distinct; he seemed to make the most he could of each day
as it came, without making all his days' works tend toward some grand
result, and go toward the upbuilding of some grand plan and purpose.
He consequently gave no promise of being either distinguished or great.
When his eyes would allow, he was an indefatigable reader; and although
he would have said that he read only for amusement, yet he amused
himself with books that were well worth the time he spent over them.
The house where he lived nominally belonged to his step-mother, but she
had taken for granted that Tom would bring his wife home to it, and
assured him that it should be to all intents and purposes his. Tom was
deeply attached to the old place, which was altogether the pleasantest
in town. He had kept bachelor's hall there most of the time since his
father's death, and he had taken great pleasure, before his marriage,
in refitting it to some extent, though it was already comfortable and
furnished in remarkably good taste. People said of him that if it had
not been for his illnesses, and if he had been a poor boy, he probably
would have made something of himself. As it was, he was not very well
known by the towns-people, being somewhat reserved, and not taking much
interest in their every-day subjects of conversation. Nobody liked him
so well as they liked his wife, yet there was no reason why he should
be disliked enough to have much said about him.
After our friends had been married for some time, and had outlived the
first strangeness of the new order of things, and had done their duty
to their neighbors with so much apparent willingness and generosity that
even Tom himself was liked a great deal better than he ever had been
before, they were sitting together one stormy evening in the library,
before the fire. Mrs. Wilson had been reading Tom the letters which had
come to him by the night's mail. There was a long one from his sister
in Nagasaki, which had been written with a good deal of ill-disguised
reproach. She complained of the smallness of the income of her share
in her father's estate, and said that she had been assured by American
friends that the smaller mills were starting up everywhere, and
beginning to do well again. Since so much of their money was invested
in the factory, she had been surprised and sorry to find by Tom's last
letters that he had seemed to have no idea of putting in a proper person
as superintendent, and going to work again. Four per cent. on her other
property, which she had been told she must soon expect instead of eight,
would make a great difference to her. A navy captain in a foreign port
was obliged to entertain a great deal, and Tom must know that it cost
them much more to live than it did him, and ought to think of their
interests. She hoped he would talk over what was best to be done with
their mother (who had been made executor, with Tom, of his father's
will).
Tom laughed a little, but looked disturbed. His wife had said something
to the same effect, and his mother had spoken once or twice in her
letters of the prospect of starting the mill again. He was not a bit of
a business man, and he did not feel certain, with the theories which
he had arrived at of the state of the country, that it was safe yet
to spend the money which would have to be spent in putting the mill
in order. "They think that the minute it is going again we shall be
making money hand over hand, just as father did when we were children,"
he said. "It is going to cost us no end of money before we can make
anything. Before father died he meant to put in a good deal of new
machinery, I remember. I don't know anything about the business myself,
and I would have sold out long ago if I had had an offer that came
anywhere near the value. The larger mills are the only ones that are
good for anything now, and we should have to bring a crowd of French
Canadians here; the day is past for the people who live in this part of
the country to go into the factory again. Even the Irish all go West
when they come into the country, and don't come to places like this
any more."
"But there are a good many of the old work-people down in the village,"
said Mrs. Wilson. "Jack Towne asked me the other day if you weren't
going to start up in the spring."
Tom moved uneasily in his chair. "I'll put you in for superintendent,
if you like," he said, half angrily, whereupon Mary threw the newspaper
at him; but by the time he had thrown it back he was in good humor
again.
"Do you know, Tom," she said, with amazing seriousness, "that I believe
I should like nothing in the world so much as to be the head of a large
business? I hate keeping house,--I always did; and I never did so much
of it in all my life put together as I have since I have been married.
I suppose it isn't womanly to say so, but if I could escape from the
whole thing I believe I should be perfectly happy. If you get rich
when the mill is going again, I shall beg for a housekeeper, and shirk
everything. I give you fair warning. I don't believe I keep this house
half so well as you did before I came here."
Tom's eyes twinkled. "I am going to have that glory,--I don't think
you do, Polly; but you can't say that I have not been forbearing. I
certainly have not told you more than twice how we used to have
things cooked. I'm not going to be your kitchen-colonel."
"Of course it seemed the proper thing to do," said his wife,
meditatively; "but I think we should have been even happier than we
have if I had been spared it. I have had some days of wretchedness
that I shudder to think of. I never know what to have for breakfast;
and I ought not to say it, but I don't mind the sight of dust. I
look upon housekeeping as my life's great discipline;" and at this
pathetic confession they both laughed heartily.
"I've a great mind to take it off your hands," said Tom. "I always
rather liked it, to tell the truth, and I ought to be a better
housekeeper,--I have been at it for five years; though housekeeping
for one is different from what it is for two, and one of them a woman.
You see you have brought a different element into my family. Luckily,
the servants are pretty well drilled. I do think you upset them a
good deal at first!"
Mary Wilson smiled as if she only half heard what he was saying. She
drummed with her foot on the floor and looked intently at the fire, and
presently gave it a vigorous poking. "Well?" said Tom, after he had
waited patiently as long as he could.
"Tom! I'm going to propose something to you. I wish you would really do
as you said, and take all the home affairs under your care, and let me
start the mill. I am certain I could manage it. Of course I should get
people who understood the thing to teach me. I believe I was made for
it; I should like it above all things. And this is what I will do: I
will bear the cost of starting it, myself,--I think I have money enough,
or can get it; and if I have not put affairs in the right trim at the
end of a year I will stop, and you may make some other arrangement. If
I have, you and your mother and sister can pay me back."
"So I am going to be the wife, and you the husband," said Tom, a little
indignantly; "at least, that is what people will say. It's a regular
Darby and Joan affair, and you think you can do more work in a day than
I can do in three. Do you know that you must go to town to buy cotton?
And do you know there are a thousand things about it that you don't
know?"
"And never will?" said Mary, with perfect good humor. "Why, Tom, I can
learn as well as you, and a good deal better, for I like business, and
you don't. You forget that I was always father's right-hand man after
I was a dozen years old, and that you have let me invest my money and
some of your own, and I haven't made a blunder yet."
Tom thought that his wife had never looked so handsome or so happy. "I
don't care, I should rather like the fun of knowing what people will
say. It is a new departure, at any rate. Women think they can do
everything better than men in these days, but I'm the first man,
apparently, who has wished he were a woman."
"Of course people will laugh," said Mary, "but they will say that it's
just like me, and think I am fortunate to have married a man who will
let me do as I choose. I don't see why it isn't sensible: you will be
living exactly as you were before you married, as to home affairs; and
since it was a good thing for you to know something about housekeeping
then, I can't imagine why you shouldn't go on with it now, since it
makes me miserable, and I am wasting a fine business talent while I
do it. What do we care for people's talking about it?"
"It seems to me that it is something like women's smoking: it isn't
wicked, but it isn't the custom of the country. And I don't like the
idea of your going among business men. Of course I should be above going
with you, and having people think I must be an idiot; they would say
that you married a manufacturing interest, and I was thrown in. I can
foresee that my pride is going to be humbled to the dust in every way,"
Tom declared in mournful tones, and began to shake with laughter. "It is
one of your lovely castles in the air, dear Polly, but an old brick mill
needs a better foundation than the clouds. No, I'll look around, and get
an honest, experienced man for agent. I suppose it's the best thing we
can do, for the machinery ought not to lie still any longer; but I mean
to sell the factory as soon as I can. I devoutly wish it would take
fire, for the insurance would be the best price we are likely to get.
That is a famous letter from Alice! I am afraid the captain has been
growling over his pay, or they have been giving too many little dinners
on board ship. If we were rid of the mill, you and I might go out there
this winter. It would be capital fun."
Mary smiled again in an absent-minded way. Tom had an uneasy feeling
that he had not heard the end of it yet, but nothing more was said for
a day or two. When Mrs. Tom Wilson announced, with no apparent thought
of being contradicted, that she had entirely made up her mind, and
she meant to see those men who had been overseers of the different
departments, who still lived in the village, and have the mill put in
order at once, Tom looked disturbed, but made no opposition; and soon
after breakfast his wife formally presented him with a handful of keys,
and told him there was some lamb in the house for dinner; and presently
he heard the wheels of her little phaeton rattling off down the road.
I should be untruthful if I tried to persuade any one that he was not
provoked; he thought she would at least have waited for his formal
permission, and at first he meant to take another horse, and chase
her, and bring her back in disgrace, and put a stop to the whole thing.
But something assured him that she knew what she was about, and he
determined to let her have her own way. If she failed, it might do no
harm, and this was the only ungallant thought he gave her. He was sure
that she would do nothing unladylike, or be unmindful of his dignity;
and he believed it would be looked upon as one of her odd, independent
freaks, which always had won respect in the end, however much they had
been laughed at in the beginning. "Susan," said he, as that estimable
person went by the door with the dust-pan, "you may tell Catherine to
come to me for orders about the house, and you may do so yourself. I
am going to take charge again, as I did before I was married. It is no
trouble to me, and Mrs. Wilson dislikes it. Besides, she is going into
business, and will have a great deal else to think of."
"Yes, sir; very well, sir," said Susan, who was suddenly moved to ask so
many questions that she was utterly silent. But her master looked very
happy; there was evidently no disapproval of his wife; and she went on
up the stairs, and began to sweep them down, knocking the dust-brush
about excitedly, as if she were trying to kill a descending colony of
insects.
Tom went out to the stable and mounted his horse, which had been waiting
for him to take his customary after-breakfast ride to the post-office,
and he galloped down the road in quest of the phaeton. He saw Mary
talking with Jack Towne, who had been an overseer and a valued workman
of his father's. He was looking much surprised and pleased.
"I wasn't caring so much about getting work, myself," he explained;
"I've got what will carry me and my wife through; but it'll be better
for the young folks about here to work near home. My nephews are wanting
something to do; they were going to Lynn next week. I don't say but I
should like to be to work in the old place again. I've sort of missed
it, since we shut down."
"I'm sorry I was so long in overtaking you," said Tom, politely, to
his wife. "Well, Jack, did Mrs. Wilson tell you she's going to start
the mill? You must give her all the help you can."
"'Deed I will," said Mr. Towne, gallantly, without a bit of
astonishment.
"I don't know much about the business yet," said Mrs. Wilson, who had
been a little overcome at Jack Towne's lingo of the different rooms and
machinery, and who felt an overpowering sense of having a great deal
before her in the next few weeks. "By the time the mill is ready, I will
be ready, too," she said, taking heart a little; and Tom, who was quick
to understand her moods, could not help laughing, as he rode alongside.
"We want a new barrel of flour, Tom, dear," she said, by way of
punishment for his untimely mirth.
If she lost courage in the long delay, or was disheartened at the steady
call for funds, she made no sign; and after a while the mill started
up, and her cares were lightened, so that she told Tom that before next
pay day she would like to go to Boston for a few days, and go to the
theatre, and have a frolic and a rest. She really looked pale and thin,
and she said she never worked so hard in all her life; but nobody knew
how happy she was, and she was so glad she had married Tom, for some
men would have laughed at it.
"I laughed at it," said Tom, meekly. "All is, if I don't cry by and by,
because I am a beggar, I shall be lucky." But Mary looked fearlessly
serene, and said that there was no danger at present.
It would have been ridiculous to expect a dividend the first year,
though the Nagasaki people were pacified with difficulty. All the
business letters came to Tom's address, and everybody who was not
directly concerned thought that he was the motive power of the
reawakened enterprise. Sometimes business people came to the mill, and
were amazed at having to confer with Mrs. Wilson, but they soon had to
respect her talents and her success. She was helped by the old clerk,
who had been promptly recalled and reinstated, and she certainly did
capitally well. She was laughed at, as she had expected to be, and
people said they should think Tom would be ashamed of himself; but it
soon appeared that he was not to blame, and what reproach was offered
was on the score of his wife's oddity. There was nothing about the mill
that she did not understand before very long, and at the end of the
second year she declared a small dividend with great pride and triumph.
And she was congratulated on her success, and every one thought of her
project in a different way from the way they had thought of it in the
beginning. She had singularly good fortune: at the end of the third year
she was making money for herself and her friends faster than most people
were, and approving letters began to come from Nagasaki. The Ashtons
had been ordered to stay in that region, and it was evident that they
were continually being obliged to entertain more instead of less. Their
children were growing fast, too, and constantly becoming more expensive.
The captain and his wife had already begun to congratulate themselves
secretly that their two sons would in all probability come into
possession, one day, of their uncle Tom's handsome property.
For a good while Tom enjoyed life, and went on his quiet way serenely.
He was anxious at first, for he thought that Mary was going to make
ducks and drakes of his money and her own. And then he did not exactly
like the looks of the thing, either; he feared that his wife was growing
successful as a business person at the risk of losing her womanliness.
But as time went on, and he found there was no fear of that, he
accepted the situation philosophically. He gave up his collection of
engravings, having become more interested in one of coins and medals,
which took up most of his leisure time. He often went to the city in
pursuit of such treasures, and gained much renown in certain quarters as
a numismatologist of great skill and experience. But at last his house
(which had almost kept itself, and had given him little to do beside
ordering the dinners, while faithful old Catherine and her niece Susan
were his aids) suddenly became a great care to him. Catherine, who had
been the main-stay of the family for many years, died after a short
illness, and Susan must needs choose that time, of all others, for
being married to one of the second hands in the mill. There followed
a long and dismal season of experimenting, and for a time there was a
procession of incapable creatures going in at one kitchen door and out
of the other. His wife would not have liked to say so, but it seemed to
her that Tom was growing fussy about the house affairs, and took more
notice of those minor details than he used. She wished more than
once, when she was tired, that he would not talk so much about the
housekeeping; he seemed sometimes to have no other thought.
In the early days of Mrs. Wilson's business life, she had made it a
rule to consult her husband on every subject of importance; but it had
speedily proved to be a formality. Tom tried manfully to show a deep
interest which he did not feel, and his wife gave up, little by little,
telling him much about her affairs. She said that she liked to drop
business when she came home in the evening; and at last she fell into
the habit of taking a nap on the library sofa, while Tom, who could not
use his eyes much by lamp-light, sat smoking or in utter idleness before
the fire. When they were first married his wife had made it a rule that
she should always read him the evening papers, and afterward they had
always gone on with some book of history or philosophy, in which they
were both interested. These evenings of their early married life had
been charming to both of them, and from time to time one would say
to the other that they ought to take up again the habit of reading
together. Mary was so unaffectedly tired in the evening that Tom never
liked to propose a walk; for, though he was not a man of peculiarly
social nature, he had always been accustomed to pay an occasional
evening visit to his neighbors in the village. And though he had little
interest in the business world, and still less knowledge of it, after a
while he wished that his wife would have more to say about what she was
planning and doing, or how things were getting on. He thought that her
chief aid, old Mr. Jackson, was far more in her thoughts than he. She
was forever quoting Jackson's opinions. He did not like to find that she
took it for granted that he was not interested in the welfare of his
own property; it made him feel like a sort of pensioner and dependent,
though, when they had guests at the house, which was by no means seldom,
there was nothing in her manner that would imply that she thought
herself in any way the head of the family. It was hard work to find
fault with his wife in any way, though, to give him his due, he rarely
tried.
But, this being a wholly unnatural state of things, the reader must
expect to hear of its change at last, and the first blow from the enemy
was dealt by an old woman, who lived near by, and who called to Tom one
morning, as he was driving down to the village in a great hurry (to post
a letter, which ordered his agent to secure a long-wished-for ancient
copper coin, at any price), to ask him if they had made yeast that
week, and if she could borrow a cupful, as her own had met with some
misfortune. Tom was instantly in a rage, and he mentally condemned her
to some undeserved fate, but told her aloud to go and see the cook. This
slight delay, besides being killing to his dignity, caused him to lose
the mail, and in the end his much-desired copper coin. It was a hard day
for him, altogether; it was Wednesday, and the first days of the week
having been stormy the washing was very late. And Mary came home to
dinner provokingly good-natured. She had met an old school-mate and her
husband driving home from the mountains, and had first taken them over
her factory, to their great amusement and delight, and then had brought
them home to dinner. Tom greeted them cordially, and manifested his
usual graceful hospitality; but the minute he saw his wife alone he said
in a plaintive tone of rebuke, "I should think you might have remembered
that the servants are unusually busy to-day. I do wish you would take a
little interest in things at home. The women have been washing, and I'm
sure I don't know what sort of a dinner we can give your friends. I wish
you had thought to bring home some steak. I have been busy myself, and
couldn't go down to the village. I thought we would only have a lunch."
Mary was hungry, but she said nothing, except that it would be all
right,--she didn't mind; and perhaps they could have some canned soup.
She often went to town to buy or look at cotton, or to see some
improvement in machinery, and she brought home beautiful bits of
furniture and new pictures for the house, and showed a touching
thoughtfulness in remembering Tom's fancies; but somehow he had an
uneasy suspicion that she could get along pretty well without him
when it came to the deeper wishes and hopes of her life, and that
her most important concerns were all matters in which he had no
share. He seemed to himself to have merged his life in his wife's;
he lost his interest in things outside the house and grounds; he
felt himself fast growing rusty and behind the times, and to have
somehow missed a good deal in life; he had a suspicion that he was
a failure. One day the thought rushed over him that his had been
almost exactly the experience of most women, and he wondered if
it really was any more disappointing and ignominious to him than
it was to women themselves. "Some of them may be contented with
it," he said to himself, soberly. "People think women are designed
for such careers by nature, but I don't know why I ever made such
a fool of myself."
Having once seen his situation in life from such a standpoint, he felt
it day by day to be more degrading, and he wondered what he should do
about it; and once, drawn by a new, strange sympathy, he went to the
little family burying ground. It was one of the mild, dim days that
come sometimes in early November, when the pale sunlight is like the
pathetic smile of a sad face, and he sat for a long time on the limp,
frost-bitten grass beside his mother's grave.
But when he went home in the twilight his step-mother, who just then
was making them a little visit, mentioned that she had been looking
through some boxes of hers that had been packed long before and stowed
away in the garret. "Everything looks very nice up there," she said,
in her wheezing voice (which, worse than usual that day, always made
him nervous); and added, without any intentional slight to his
feelings, "I do think you have always been a most excellent
housekeeper."
"I'm tired of such nonsense!" he exclaimed, with surprising
indignation. "Mary, I wish you to arrange your affairs so that
you can leave them for six months at least. I am going to spend
this winter in Europe."
"Why, Tom, dear!" said his wife, appealingly. "I couldn't leave my
business any way in the"--
But she caught sight of a look on his usually placid countenance that
was something more than decision, and refrained from saying anything
more.
And three weeks from that day they sailed.
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