Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.
So wrote an English poet who would perhaps not have thought that people like the McOmishes had any right to noble passions. But if he had known more about people – and he knew much – he would have known that a man scorned is also a prey to fury.
From that moment, William was a man melting in fury. It was at best a silent, unsleeping fury, but it disposed him more and more toward asthma, his ancient enemy, and asthma turned him to the needle, and after the needle his fury spoke loud and long. Scenes of the bitterest abuse were frequent, and as he stormed Virginia sat silent, a figure of mute martyrdom and hatred for her tormentor.
William did not rant about sex – certainly not – but he abused his cold, unloving wife and what he could not bring himself to say about her he said about Aunt.
Poor Mrs. McOmish! Who could believe what she went through? To come to such a pass – she, a woman of good family, a Vanderlip – and to put up with it without a word! Of course she spoke to her minister, the Reverend Wilbur Woolarton Woodside, and he gave the best advice he could, which was shallow and inept. Of course she had to speak to her brother, the Doctor, who shook his head and said that Will had let his medicine become his habit, and he had known dreadful cases of that. He gave his sister a silver teapot and sugar bowl, which did not have much effect on the problem. Of course she spoke to Aunt, who declared that she had always thought there was bad blood in William McOmish, and she wished she had spoken more firmly before Virgie had married him. But the very best of us can’t always know what’s best for others, and Virgie had refused to listen to hints. She had made her bed and now, Aunt supposed, she must lie in it.
Nobody but these intimates were supposed to know what was going on, but of course everybody knew it, for the clerks in the drugstores to which William went for his supplies told this one and that one, always in strict confidence. On the q.t. Part of the bitterness of bourgeois life is that there are really no secrets.
(18)
THUS MALVINA grew to be twenty-eight, the calm, dignified Miss McOmish, so active and popular in church work, especially in getting up entertainments. Malvina also sang. She was a contralto, and it was through her singing that she had met Rhodri Gilmartin. It was some time before their friendship reached the point where she dared, greatly fearing, to ask him to her home.
Rhodri was very popular in singing circles, for he possessed a fine, natural tenor voice. Of course he had his limitations, for he was just a journeyman printer, and his family had come within living memory – which was to be a raw newcomer in those old Ontario towns – from what a lot of people still called the Old Country. The Dutch backbone of the town, and all the country round, knew that it was not their Old Country, which they had not forgotten in the almost two hundred years since they had set out from Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, and The Hague. Perhaps they had sided with the British during the regrettable revolution, and had had to make a run for it to Canada, but to them Englishmen were still suspect: foreigners with peculiar ways. So a growing sympathy between a good Dutch girl (a little flawed by a Highland father but still so Dutch that the Scots blood hardly counted) and a johnny-come-lately was not regarded with favour.
Malvina, in the manner of the day, was becoming rather desperate; she was just over thirty, after which anniversary a woman became a certified Old Maid. In her mind, also, there was a war of fidelities: she must certainly honour her father and her mother, but they gave her no honour in return, and she faced a life of office work on their behalf; she did not strongly want a husband and children, but she very strongly wanted not to be an Old Maid; she had some romantic ideas about love, picked up from novels and the plays in which her ideal, Miss Van Cortland, figured but she had never experienced love in her own life, or seen it evinced in the lives of others in any way that made it look attractive. Under such pressure of conflicting ideas, she fell in love with Rhodri Gilmartin.
He was good-looking, he dressed well, and in the fashion of the time and the place he had an elegantly waxed moustache, not tortured into ridiculous bodkins of hair, but discreetly pointed at the ends. He sang, movingly, the ballads of the time by Fred E. Weatherley and Guy d’Hardelot; and there was one of a somewhat earlier time –
I fear no foe in shining armour,
Though his lance be swift and keen;
But I fear and love the glamour
Through thy drooping lashes seen.
– that Malvina found irresistible.
He talked. He did not talk tediously about the Japanese War, like William McOmish. He did not thresh old straw like Mother and Aunt. He talked about really interesting things – books and music and church picnics, and bicycle races and of course the theatre (he had seen Henry Irving and been profoundly influenced by that charismatic actor), and, best of all, he made jokes. He also made grave social errors.
“Have you thought of trying your hand at making ladders, Mr. McOmish?” he asked one Sunday at midday dinner. “Ed Holterman has done very well with ladders and nothing else, I understand.”
Matters were very much on the downhill grade for the McOmish family; indeed, it was the combined earnings of the three girls that was keeping it afloat, for William had had nothing to do for months, and had been incapable of doing anything well for at least two years. He gasped continually with asthma, and sought the relief of the needle several times a day. Most of the time he sat at the table glassy-eyed, and pushed his food into heaps with his fork. But this well-meant suggestion from the Englishman (the McOmishes had no truck with Welsh pretension) in reply to some comment about the scarcity of building contracts roused him to a Highland blaze.
“Are you suggesting that I’d lower myself to the level of a common carpenter like Ed Holterman? Make ladders? Me, that built Grace Church, and finished it when the architect threw in the sponge? Me that’s built half the finest residences in this city? You don’t know who you’re talking to, young feller. It looks as if you don’t know who I am.”
Then gasping, and the awful pallor of the face, and the retreat to the bedroom, for what everybody at the table knew about, and what nobody at the table wanted to give a name.
Gilmartin’s apologies were unheard by Mr. McOmish, and received with grim silence by Mrs. McOmish. Nobody, of course, might leave the table until Mrs. McOmish had drunk the last of her unnumbered cups of strong tea. When, at last, it was possible to leave the table, it was understood that the girls should wash the dishes. Virginia and the silent figure at the table, who was Aunt, went to the back-parlour for the threshing of some agreeably new straw, for of course Aunt’s judgement on the unhappy remark of Rhodri Gilmartin must be heard and chewed over. Had his eye on Malvina, had he? Had too much to say, if you wanted Aunt’s opinion. Been hovering around for at least two years. When was he going to pop – if he meant to?
Aunt was now alone. It was five years ago that Daniel Boutell had left the house one day with a carpet-bag, since when neither hide nor hair of him had been seen, nor so much as a postcard received. But Aunt had her dowry money still, and on that she “managed,” making a great deal of self-honouring fuss about it. After all, as Virginia often said in these sessions, had anybody expected anything better of Dan? He had married Cynthia for her dowry, but she was one too many for him, thank the Lord. What had she ever seen in him?
Malvina and Gilmartin as usual retire to the front-parlour, well in view of Mrs. McOmish and Aunt, and after some quiet talk they go for a walk, and it is on that walk that Rhodri proposes and is accepted. He has, in the cant of the day, popped.
What then? Marry? Malvina marry? The thing is too big for comprehension. Marry, when the family fortunes are so low, and her salary needed? Marry, when Pa is so ill and needs so much money for his medicine? Marry, and leave Mother, who has to put up with the Lord knows what, when Pa is not himself? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, says Mrs. McOmish, thinking she is quoting the Bible. Had
n’t Malvina seen enough of marriage, asks Aunt, who has now set up as a great expert on the married state. As for the sisters, Caroline and Minnie, they are stricken, for if Malvina leaves the household, however will they manage Ma and Pa alone? Not to speak of the money. Marry the Englishman? It is out of the question.
(19)
MALVINA IS DRIVEN to devise a stratagem. She has a talk with her mother and, in language that is the more horrible for being veiled, suggests, without really saying, that she has to be married, or disgrace will overtake them all. It is not really a lie, because it is not precisely framed; it is a tissue of hints. She has said nothing of this to Rhodri, who would despise it as a lie, deeply discreditable to Janet’s son. As for Virginia, she will say nothing to William. This is women’s business. Thus it is that in the McOmish front-parlour shortly afterward, the Reverend Wilbur Woolarton Woodside unites Malvina in holy matrimony to her hoodwinked bridegroom, and the register is signed by the bride’s hoodwinked parents and by Aunt. No relatives of the bridegroom are present, nor have they been asked. The evening ends in profound gloom for the McOmishes. The bride and groom have taken the night train to Niagara Falls.
All of this I see, filmed in sepia, a colour which seems to put the action at a distance, and lessen its emotional impact. But not for me. These people are my people and I suffer with them, and I do not take sides. I feel the ruin that faces William and Virginia as poignantly as I understand the predicament of Malvina and Rhodri. This is no tragedy of star-crossed lovers, nor are the elders of a stature to achieve tragic proportion. Theorists of the drama may deal in tragedy and comedy, but the realities of life are played more often in the mode of melodrama, farce and grotesquerie.
Grotesquerie – and now, briefly, terror. One night Virginia turns on her husband and, as she tells Aunt, later, lets him have the rough side of her tongue. Sick, is he? Maybe he is sick, but it isn’t the asthma that ails him. It’s that stuff, which has made a slave and an orray-eyed tyrant and monster of him.
Wasn’t it her own brother who introduced him to it, he counters. Yes, and didn’t her brother think he was man enough to use it prudently? And what has he done? He’s become a – she can’t bring herself to say it, but he knows well enough what she means. That’s what he is now, and well he knows it. And hasn’t her brother washed his hands of the case, says William, because he’s too God-Almighty righteous to come and look at what he’s done? Oh, for the Lord’s sake, be a man, she cries. Be a man? Is that it? How often has she given him a chance to be a man? Because he’s too good a Christian to gad up to Kate Lake’s with her rowdy old goat of a brother-in-law, he’s lived in a hell that only a man knows. A hell of her making. Her, and that Lapland witch of a sister of hers. Don’t talk to him about being a man! What about being a woman? Has she been a woman? Eh? Has she? Seven times in thirty years of marriage. She can count as well as he can. Seven times, and three children! And every time with tears and reproaches, as if he was some kind of a dirty beast. Doesn’t she read her Bible? Isn’t the woman the servant of the man? Isn’t he the head of the household? Hasn’t he loaded her with every luxury a decent woman can want? Hasn’t she one of the finest houses in town, built with all the skill Almighty God blessed him with? He’s a man in the street, but in his own home he’s a dog, because he’s a Christian man, and won’t force a woman.
Street saint and home devil! That’s what he adds up to! Street saint and home devil!
Virginia screams it. She is dressed from head to foot in mourning for one of the Vanderlip brothers who has been gored by a bull, but William is in his nightshirt, barefooted, and at the disadvantage of the naked when faced with the clothed. In his rage he seizes a carving-knife and pursues her around the dining-table, not rapidly, but slowly and with menace.
“Devil, am I?” he says, in a low voice. “Well then, a Devil I’ll be.”
She retreats in horror. For several seconds she cannot scream, but when her voice returns to her she screams loud and long, and screams again and again, until Caroline and Minnie, white with terror, rush into the room and join her in screaming. They dare not seize Pa, or protect Ma, but they can scream, and they do.
William is not Devil enough to hold out against such screaming. Like many another man, he is terrified of the maenad shrieking of women. He drops the knife and rushes from the room to the chest of drawers where he keeps his only remaining treasure.
(20)
THE CULMINATION of this is that next day Edmund and Dr. George Harmon Vanderlip come to their sister’s aid at a family conference, and read the Riot Act to William, who is hardly in a condition to understand it. The upshot is that Virginia and the girls are moved into a humble house that was William’s when first he married – an old razeee, William calls it, and from his master builder’s point of view that is what it is – and Dr. George Harmon Vanderlip handsomely agrees with Brother Edmund to pay what it costs in taxes. The house, by law, may be rescued from the ruin of William’s fortunes. Of course furniture for this dwelling must come from the big house with the horseshoe front window, and Virginia and the girls contrive, somehow, to take most of what there is, leaving William alone in a house that is empty of all but a bed and a few chairs and some pots and pans.
It is there that William is bivouacked on the night when Gil visits him, and I first see them at their midnight conference.
Final ruin impends. Every penny that William had is gone, and of course all Virginia’s dowry money has gone with it. Bankruptcy is to be completed in a few days, and everybody, greatly assisted by Aunt’s judgement, has agreed that Virginia must be legally separated from a bankrupt, for bankruptcy in that society is one of the darkest sins, and almost the ultimate disgrace.
(21)
AS DAWN SHOWS its first grey light through the horseshoe window, Gil at last has his way. William signs the papers. The indivisible marriage is no more.
The day following William is to be seen, dressed in his best black, riding in a carry-all driven by an aged pauper, accompanied only by the sheriff of the county. He is being taken to the county home for paupers and the mentally unstable. Everybody knows where that carry-all hails from.
Is he sunk in shame? No, as the old Devil makes this decisive journey he smiles sardonically to right and left, and raises his battered top hat to anybody he recognizes. Lifts it with a special sweep to Mrs. Long-Pott-Ott who passes in her barouche. She smiles and nods, good woman that she is.
Lifts it to whatever power it is that has used him so capriciously. William has faced ruin in several different guises, and the old Devil is showing the world precisely what he thinks of it.
Happy are they who die in youth
when their renown is around them!
Is it so, Ossian? Always?
V
Scenes from a Marriage
WHEN I WAS ALIVE I sometimes tried to read those books that sought to explain what Time is, but I could never make head nor tail of them. They asked for a mathematical ability that was beyond me, or for some philosophical flight which I could not accept. But now that I am dead, what is this element in which I live if it is not Time? For a while after my death things were easier, and what I apprehended was attached to the ordinary Time I had known while I lived; that Time is no longer mine, for now I recognize neither night nor day, minute nor hour. All measure of Time is slipping away and my glassy essence, as Shakespeare calls it (and I can do no better), knows no measures, no boundaries. Surely what knows no bounds must be Eternity.
Not Eternity yet. Not quite. I know these films, that I watch in the company of the Sniffer. He sees another film, somewhat kindred to my own, and it has a beginning and an end; as I take my place when he takes his, and leave it when he goes back to the Advocate offices to write his review, there is at least that much measure of time.
What is the film today? He is to see something more recent than the films heretofore; it is Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, which dates from – when was it? – 1972. I saw it before I
was married. Before I met Esme, indeed. What I saw was the trimmed version that was shown commercially; this is to be the full work as Bergman conceived it. Something recovered from a film archive.
I know that I shall not see that film. And yet, as the cinema darkens and the screen comes to life, I see, on my own personal screen, the same title: Scenes from a Marriage. Something from my personal archive.
What marriage? My own? Not in the scene that appears. That is certainly the library at St. Helen’s, my grandparents’ house in Salterton, which I remember from boyhood visits. It was on the lakeshore, and the sound of the waters of Lake Ontario is part of my memory of it, and part of what I see and hear now. Who are these people, sitting by the fire? Grandfather, Rhodri Gilmartin, now in his early sixties, a rich man, a powerful man, an owner of newspapers, a man with political influence and, as the world measures success, a success. One would hardly recognize this sturdy man as the slight youth who passed a miserable night with his father-in-law, William McOmish, it must be – what? – more than thirty-five years ago.
Who is that old woman-older, probably, than her years – in the rocking-chair on the other side of the fire? Malvina McOmish she once was, and I sense that she is so still, in the depths of her being, as Rhodri is still the long-headed Welsh lad who gathered some alms from the wreckage of that failed tailor-shop. Malvina is plainly an invalid, but what is her illness?