New Grub Street by George Gissing (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕

“I shall not consent to this.”

“In that case, Amy, I must do without your consent. The rooms will be taken, and our furniture transferred to them.”

“To me that will make no difference,” returned his wife, in the same voice as before. “I have decided⁠—as you told me to⁠—to go with Willie to mother’s next Tuesday. You, of course, must do as you please. I should have thought a summer at the seaside would have been more helpful to you; but if you prefer to live in Islington⁠—”

Reardon approached her, and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Amy, are you my wife, or not?”

“I am certainly not the wife of a clerk who is paid so much a week.”

He had foreseen a struggle, but without certainty of the form Amy’s opposition would take. For himself he meant to be gently resolute, calmly regardless of protest. But in a man to whom such self-assertion is a matter of conscious effort, tremor of the nerves will always interfere with the line of conduct he has conceived in advance. Already Reardon had spoken with far more bluntness than he proposed; involuntarily, his voice slipped from earnest determination to the note of absolutism, and, as is wont to be the case, the sound of these strange tones instigated him to further utterances of the same kind. He lost control of himself. Amy’s last reply went through him like an electric shock, and for the moment he was a mere husband defied by his wife, the male stung to exertion of his brute force against the physically weaker sex.

“However you regard me, you will do what I think fit. I shall not argue with you. If I choose to take lodgings in Whitechapel, there you will come and live.”

He met Amy’s full look, and was conscious of that in it which corresponded to his own brutality. She had become suddenly a much older woman; her cheeks were tight drawn into thinness, her lips were bloodlessly hard, there was an unknown furrow along her forehead, and she glared like the animal that defends itself with tooth and claw.

“Do as you think fit? Indeed!”

Could Amy’s voice sound like that? Great Heaven! With just such accent he had heard a wrangling woman retort upon her husband at the street corner. Is there then no essential difference between a woman of this world and one of that? Does the same nature lie beneath such unlike surfaces?

He had but to do one thing: to seize her by the arm, drag her up from the chair, dash her back again with all his force⁠—there, the transformation would be complete, they would stand towards each other on the natural footing. With an added curse perhaps⁠—Instead of that, he choked, struggled for breath, and shed tears.

Amy turned scornfully away from him. Blows and a curse would have overawed her, at all events for the moment; she would have felt: “Yes, he is a man, and I have put my destiny into his hands.” His tears moved her to a feeling cruelly exultant; they were the sign of her superiority. It was she who should have wept, and never in her life had she been further from such display of weakness.

This could not be the end, however, and she had no wish to terminate the scene. They stood for a minute without regarding each other, then Reardon faced to her.

“You refuse to live with me, then?”

“Yes, if this is the kind of life you offer me.”

“You would be more ashamed to share your husband’s misfortunes than to declare to everyone that you had deserted him?”

“I shall ‘declare to everyone’ the simple truth. You have the opportunity of making one more effort to save us from degradation. You refuse to take the trouble; you prefer to drag me down into a lower rank of life. I can’t and won’t consent to that. The disgrace is yours; it’s fortunate for me that I have a decent home to go to.”

“Fortunate for you!⁠—you make yourself unutterably contemptible. I have done nothing that justifies you in leaving me. It is for me to judge what I can do and what I can’t. A good woman would see no degradation in what I ask of you. But to run away from me just because I am poorer than you ever thought I should be⁠—”

He was incoherent. A thousand passionate things that he wished to say clashed together in his mind and confused his speech. Defeated in the attempt to act like a strong man, he could not yet recover standing-ground, knew not how to tone his utterances.

“Yes, of course, that’s how you will put it,” said Amy. “That’s how you will represent me to your friends. My friends will see it in a different light.”

“They will regard you as a martyr?”

“No one shall make a martyr of me, you may be sure. I was unfortunate enough to marry a man who had no delicacy, no regard for my feelings.⁠—I am not the first woman who has made a mistake of this kind.”

“No delicacy? No regard for your feelings?⁠—Have I always utterly misunderstood you? Or has poverty changed you to a woman I can’t recognise?”

He came nearer, and gazed desperately into her face. Not a muscle of it showed susceptibility to the old influences.

“Do you know, Amy,” he added in a lower voice, “that if we part now, we part forever?”

“I’m afraid that is only too likely.”

She moved aside.

“You mean that you wish it. You are weary of me, and care for nothing but how to make yourself free.”

“I shall argue no more. I am tired to death of it.”

“Then say nothing, but listen for the last time to my view of the position we have come to. When I consented to leave you for a time, to go away and try to work in solitude, I was foolish and even insincere, both to you and to myself. I knew that I was undertaking the impossible. It was just putting