The End of the Dream - ebook

The End of the Dream

The first time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks, governesses, caretakers and charwomen.

Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering why she had chosen him–she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned–from her, never from him–the distress and anxiety from which he had released her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.

Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him, which she did.

“She is a cut above me, Essie is,” he used to say rubbing his hands, and looking at her with joyful pride. It was true. Essie looked among us like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the sleepless suspicion of the great middle class to which Ted and I belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a simple, humble, and rather timid creature.

I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by a large dog.

He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without imagination.

Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen socks himself.

He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her, though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to become so.

Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don’t think she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always find adorable.

I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the balcony, pushing aside all Essie’s tubs of flowering tulips to make room for a dreadful striped hammock.

“The thing I can’t understand about you English women,” said the visitor to Essie, “is why you treat your men as if they were household pets.”

“What an excellent description of an English husband,” said Essie. “That is just what he is.”

“What’s that? What’s that?” said Ted, rushing in from the balcony, but as he never waited for an answer Essie seldom troubled to give him one.

Perhaps I should never have known Essie if I had not fallen ill in her house. Ted and she were kindness itself, but as I slowly climbed the hill of convalescence I saw less of him and more of her. He was constantly away, transacting business in various places, and I must own a blessed calm fell upon the house when the front door slammed, and he was creating a lucrative turmoil elsewhere. The weather was hot, and we sat out evening after evening in the square garden. Gradually, very gradually, a suspicion had arisen in my mind that there was another Essie whose existence Ted and I had so far never guessed. I saw that she did–perhaps by instinct–what wise women sometimes do of set purpose. She gave to others what they wanted from her, not necessarily the best she had to give. Ted had received from her exactly what he hoped and desired, and–he was happy.

The evening came when I made a sudden demand on her sympathy. In the quiet darkness of the square garden I told her of a certain agonising experience of my own which in one year had pushed me from youth into middle age, and had turned me not to stone, but into a rolling stone.

“I imagined it was something of that kind that was the matter with you,” she said in her gentle rather toneless voice.

“You guessed it,” I said amazed. I had thought I was a closed book to the whole world. “You never spoke of your idea to Ted?”

“Never. Why should I?”

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