by A. J. Cronin
Unquestionably, the main cause of the breakdown of so many marriages is that people enter into the wedded state too lightly, too rashly, and with an utterly false conception of its real meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, however, the idea of sex appeal as the primary basis for matrimony, steeped in a sickly romanticism and sugared with the false promise of an eternal honeymoon, has become an integral part of the modern dream. Physical attraction has its place in marriage – in the most successful partnerships I have known, this has lasted for twenty, thirty, even forty years. But there are other, infinitely more important qualities than ruby lips, sparkling eyes, or the much advertised allure of a peach-and-cream complexion. The rocky road of life demands stronger apparel than sheer silk negligée, stouter footwear than a pair of high-heeled shoes. Love at first sight is a dangerous illusion; nothing is truer than that wise old adage – marry in haste, repent at leisure. If only half the young people who, at the first note of the cuckoo, fall swooning into each other’s arms could be educated to those realities, how much of that wretched postnuptial ‘letdown’ would be spared them. To every infatuated young man about to marry I would quote Kipling’s description of woman: ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’; to every young bride I would say: ‘your hero, your great lover, is just another average man.’
That immortal character, the Vicar of Wakefield, in his opening remark, comes very close to the point: ‘I chose my wife,’ he says, ‘as she chose her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well.’ Not, mark you, because she was another Aphrodite. In my native Scotland, so often the target for humorous criticism, courtship is regarded as a serious affair. A couple will ‘walk out’ together for several years, getting to know each other in steady companionship, discussing the future in detail, saving their money, making practical arrangements for their life together, so that when, after this period of probation, they finally settle down, they do so on a solid foundation of understanding and respect, faced by none of those dangers which so often blight the beginnings of matrimony.
Certainly the early months of any marriage are by far the most crucial. The excitement of the wedding ceremony is over, the exacting raptures of the honeymoon have diminished, and not infrequently the newlyweds come down to earth with a heavy and unexpected jolt. They are not quite used to living together, nor do they yet have the maturity or experience to adapt themselves to a routine which appears, all at once, to bristle with the stubborn facts of life – problems of finance and household management, doubts and difficulties with regard to sex, relatives, religion, even commencing irritations in respect of each other’s personal habits. They believed that all they had to do to gain perpetual bliss was to marry. Both built up a glittering edifice of expectations. And now what? Nothing but a pile of greasy dishes by the kitchen sink, an unmade bed, the slam of the apartment door as the young husband snatches a perfunctory kiss and makes a frantic rush to catch a bus to the city. At such a moment life suddenly seems sour, stale, insufferably humdrum. And then it is that the insidious thought may be given birth in the subconscious of each partner: Was I wise to take this fateful step? Wouldn’t I have been better off if I had kept my freedom?
In a seedy two-room flat in a back street of Bayswater I came across just such a couple. They had been married only a year, but now, disillusioned by the drabness of their environment, the limitations imposed upon their personal ambitions, and the frequent clashes of their temperaments, they had decided that the time had come to separate. He was an architect, a clever young fellow who, rather than continue his present work with a large firm of contractors planning semi-detached suburban dwellings, was resolved to go to Rome to resume his studies – he wanted to build a great, a tremendous cathedral. She, a college graduate with a passion for art, was not a whit behind in her fierce determination to abandon her hated cooking, washing, and ironing, in favour of a fuller and freer life on the Left Bank in Paris. Each separately confided these intentions to me with a bitter intensity rendered more pathetic by the fact that they really loved each other. There is no knowing what folly they might have committed. But fortunately Nature took a hand, and, as their physician, I was able to inform them that they would shortly have a child. This wholly unsuspected contingency brought them up short, caused them to realise their responsibilities, and, as there was a great deal of good in both of them, made them determine on a fresh start. They now have four children, and while he has not achieved his Italian cathedral, nor she her place of honour in the Louvre, they have safely weathered their early troubles, prospered financially, and made a fine comfortable home for themselves.
Without doubt, children are the greatest saviours of the marriage state – statistics show that by far the largest number of divorces occur between childless couples. The coming of a child into the family brings a sense of achievement, of fulfilment, to the young parents. It binds them more closely, with a new solidarity, creates fresh interests and delights in watching and guiding the baby from infancy onward, gives to them an opportunity, a purpose, to develop an individual who will be a credit to society and themselves. Make no mistake – children are not entirely angelic creatures ‘trailing clouds of glory from above’, ready to cure all parental woes, to straighten out all family conflicts. More often than not the arrival of a baby upsets the household arrangements, by night as well as by day, disturbs the balance between husband and wife, creates new hazards, problems, and anxieties. But the baby is worth all this, a hundred times over. How wise are those couples who redeem the ill fortune of a sterile union by the kindly process of adoption! Husbands who shirk the responsibilities of parenthood, wives who refuse to fulfil the functions of motherhood, are prostituting the marriage state.
At my university, when I graduated, we had an old Highland professor of medicine who used to give his class this valedictory advice: ‘Go out and get married, lads. Have children. Raise them fine, strong, and healthy. And bring them up to be a credit to you.’ He was a wise old man, versed in the snares and pitfalls of the world, and he practised what he preached … he had a son who became, later, one of Europe’s foremost physicians.
Such an attitude of mind demands that marriage and the family be taken seriously. We have to work, and work hard, for the joys and satisfactions that come from family life. We must learn to make adjustments, to meet trials and hardships not easy to bear, develop understanding and self-control, practise the silent virtues of patience and self-sacrifice. How often was I brought face to face with examples of such heroism, acts of courage and devotion, unheralded and unsung, which nevertheless spoke volumes for the strength and richness, the finely knit texture of family ties. I have known a wife who suffered for months, without a murmur, a painful and dangerous malady, refusing to tell her husband lest it upset him during some protracted business negotiations vital to his future. On another occasion, I was called in to an elderly woman, a widowed mother, who had literally starved herself into a breakdown to save some extra money so that her brilliant son might take his degree at Trinity College. And how vividly do I recollect that young man who called to engage me for his wife’s confinement … their first child. When he nervously opened his wallet in my consulting-room two cardboard slips fell out, quite by accident, upon my desk. I picked them up. They were pawn-tickets. Confusedly, he explained that lately he had been working only half time and had pledged his watch to pay a deposit on my fee. I told him at once that this was unnecessary, that he could pay me when his circumstances improved. Then, curiously, I asked:
‘And the other ticket?’
He became more embarrassed than ever, finally made this halting admission. Tomorrow was his wife’s birthday. He couldn’t, simply couldn’t, let it pass. He had pawned his war medals to buy her a present, a little silver brooch.
The home is built on such instances of thoughtfulness and self-denial. It is no place for the selfish, self-indulgent man or woman. Marriage is no joy ride. But those who do not disown their responsibilities, who face up to the hard facts an
d overcome them, will reap a rich reward in the warmth and intimacy of family life, the joy of a house which is not merely a place to sleep in, the common interests, sympathies, and pleasures of a united home. If I speak feelingly here, it is because of the happiness which my own marriage has brought me, a happiness due to that stroke of fortune which gave me a wife so finely moulded by her early training; so patient, self-sacrificing, and wise; above all, so completely staunch in every vicissitude of our partnership of thirty years that life without her now would be unthinkable.
Many times I have been asked to name the virtue most necessary to secure such perfect unity. Undoubtedly, the answer is: loyalty. The worst offence against the marriage state, the rock upon which the family happiness is most often shipwrecked, is infidelity. In too many instances, alas, the standard of morality has fallen to a new low. Unfaithfulness is a shoddy business, a despicable betrayal of mutual trust, the meanest sin in the book of human wrongdoing.
But there are other disloyalties which, while physically less obvious, are in their own way just as dangerous. In my practice I knew a family – mother, father, adolescent son, and daughter – in which, despite affluent circumstances and a superfluity of the good things of life, there existed a constant undercurrent of disharmony. The wife was unquestionably a virtuous woman. She would have scorned the barest suggestion that she might be even remotely untrue to her husband. Yet all day long her unconscious desire seemed to be to disparage him in the eyes of the children – raising her brows, exchanging an ironic glance with her son or daughter, when he made a simple remark, appearing somehow to criticise his opinions, his dress, even his appearance.
This inherent disloyalty is equally manifested by wives who discuss their husbands behind their backs, husbands who mourn to other women how much they are misunderstood, wives and husbands who fly for sympathy to a friend, relative, or mother, bearing sad tales of this and that injustice, of her extravagance and his cruelty – all the catalogue of human defects which they see in the other party but fail to recognise in themselves.
No partnership can survive under such conditions; a house divided against itself will never stand. Such people should bury their bickering in their own back-yard, smile, if they can, at each other’s failings, try to laugh off that dreadful grievance which, magnified and distorted, mates John such a monster and Jane a heartless slut. Of all the aids to family equilibrium, none is more blessedly useful than a sense of humour.
How well do I remember one evening in the early months of my marriage, coming home to the shabby lodgings which we occupied in Tregenny, that rough Welsh village where I had started, and was trying to build up, a medical practice. I was depressed, worried about a bad case, dead-tired after a hard day’s work in the rain, and ravenously hungry. I could have eaten an entire ox. Instead, my young wife gracefully produced one small boiled egg. By a great effort I controlled myself, broke open the shell. It was rotten. At that, everything gave way. I started up with all the adjectives and abuse at my command. Wherupon my spouse, who had wrestled with her own tribulations that day, gave back as good as she received. The exchange went from bad to worse till suddenly, at the breaking point, we stopped short, viewed each other with congested eyeballs, then, struck by the absurdity of it all, dissolved into a wild fit of laughter and fell into each other’s arms. Harmony restored, we took the train ten miles down the valley to the nearest town, ate a satisfying supper of ‘ faggots’, then went to the tin-roofed cinema to see Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. What might have been a tragic rupture ended instead in a joyful reconciliation, all because two young people had sense enough to see the humour in an overripe egg.
Good-natured tolerance does much to make the wheels of family life turn smoothly, and, especially as one grows older, it works wonders to practise that tactful diplomacy which might be called the art of being nice to one another. If your husband begins to lose his hair, to puff slightly as he goes upstairs, do not comment on these brutal symptoms of the passage of the years. Should your wife show signs of putting on weight, onset of that middle-aged spread, tell her emphatically that in her plumpness she is more attractive than when first you fell in love with her. When your children are noisy and untidy, come to table without washing their hands, or leave footmarks on the newly polished floor, try to achieve better behaviour without losing your temper or indulging in that exercise known as ‘bawling them out’. A little generosity, some slight encouragement, can be more effective than a hundred applications of the rod. Thank goodness, we cannot exact from our offspring the priggish, often browbeaten, submissiveness of the Victorian age. But we can replace it with an affectionate comradeship infinitely better.
Tenderness and goodwill are potent factors in promoting the unity and stability of the family. Most powerful of all, however, is the need for some manifestation of religious spirit. Doubtless we have come a long way since those days when the Bible was read aloud in every home. It may be that the picture of the child murmuring his prayers at his mother’s knee is now viewed by many with due derision, as a sentimental chromo of the past. But unless some regard is paid to spiritual values in the home, the family therein will inevitably founder. Man does not live by bread alone. A family will never flourish unless it draws its inspiration from above. ‘ The family that prays together, stays together.’
From the beginning of time man’s bade desire has been to take himself a mate, to have children, to provide them with shelter, fire, and food, to protect them from dangers threatened by the outside world. The coming of Christianity served to hallow and dignify this primal impulse. And thereafter, through the centuries, the family has taken foremost place, not only in the safeguarding of morality, but in the evolution of human culture. Wherever the family flourishes in a state of vigour and unity, there will be found a strong and sound society. In an era of fear and restlessness, when man, ringed by hostile forces, feels isolated in a dark loneliness, it is his main, his ultimate hope … his hope for self-preservation, for maintaining human dignity, and the decencies of life.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Of all the patients who passed through my consulting-room – a long procession – none were more lamentable than those brought there by their own excesses. As I sat at my desk, my eyes shaded by my hand, listening in silence, like an abbé in his confessional, to some disastrous history of self-indulgence, I could not but reflect on the sweet virtue of moderation. And often, wryly, I called to memory the prophetic words of my puritanical old grandmother whose ancestor had died for the Covenant at Bothwell Bridge and who, when I was a child and detected in some misdemeanour, would call me to her knee and, having first placed her steel-rimmed spectacles in her Bible to mark the place, inform me that I should not receive from her my usual Saturday ‘fairing’, then solemnly adjure me: ‘ You see now … it pays to be good.’
But, in this last court of appeal, when the patient was stripped for examination on my couch, it was seldom a smiling matter. There were the gluttons, the voracious eaters who, unable to resist the lure of rich meats and succulent sauces, of pâté and pastries and truffles, had already dug their own graves with their teeth. The old lechers, with soggy prostates, weakened sphincters, and all the load of misery which the goddess Venus joyously bestows upon her acolytes in reward for a lifetime’s service. Then the drug addicts, of every shape and variety – from the pitiful old scrubwoman who used to beg tremblingly for a bottle of laudanum ‘to ease her colic’ – and who usually got it, poor creature – to the smart society girl, glibly sure of herself but with twitching nerves, flashing a false heroin prescription and vainly asking me to oblige her by filling it, ‘as the chemist’s was closed.’
Finally, there were the dipsomaniacs.
‘You’re wanted at once, Doctor.’
What for?’
‘It’s Murray, Doctor. At Lee’s lodging-house in the Lane.’
‘I’ve no patient called Murray. What’s the matter with him?’
‘Drunk. Dead drunk again.’<
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‘Damn it all. That’s no business of mine.’
‘I think it better be.’ The shady-looking youth with close-cropped head and evasive eyes, who had brought the message to the surgery side door, shrugged his shoulders enigmatically. ‘Or else he’s sure going to croak.’
I bit my lip. How I detested these calls to Notting Hill Lane! They always meant trouble. Then, with an ill grace, I said that I would be along as soon as I was free.
Presently, then, I made my way through the nest of slums which made up the district of ‘ the Lane’ and hammered on the blistered door of a doss-house which bore a soiled card: ‘Good Beds: Men Only.’ A young slattern in a shawl, who, despite the notice prohibiting her sex, seemed quite at home, admitted me.
‘Murray?’ I growled at her.
‘All right, all right. Keep your blinking hair on. There’s his room – up there.’
It was a small cubicle at the rear of the house. Because of the back-to-back construction in that congested area, the room was so dark I had to stand for a moment until my eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom. Then I made out a man lying on the torn straw mattress of a truckle bed, still wearing his clothes and boots. He was unshaven, his coat foul with mud, his collar ripped open at the neck, his eyes staring with a sort of horror into infinity. Around him was the evidence of poverty, wretchedness, misery – a bare table, an old burst trunk, a score of battered books. The squalid confusion of the room, the pitiful extremity of its occupant, forced an exclamation from me.
‘My God,’ I muttered involuntarily. ‘ What a mess!’
The sound partly roused the man upon the bed, he began to mutter incoherently to himself. He was in a thoroughly bad way, with dilated pupils, general muscular tremor, and so deeply cyanosed I could tell at once that his heart was in the Stokes-Adams syndrome. But the symptoms of delirium tremens are not particularly inspiring; I shall not dwell upon them. As I gave him a hypodermic of strychnine he raved at me feebly – the painful rhetoric of imagination driven mad by alcohol, a stream of nonsense forced from his sick, tormented mind. But as the spasm passed and he fell back exhausted on the bed, he suddenly quoted:
