JEALOUSY

Jealousy is the worst and most terrible in the sinful category. Jealousy may not be the unforgivable sin, but it is certainly the unforgiving one. Jealousy is not to be defined or analysed. There is a method in madness and a refinement in Love, but Jealousy knows neither how to plan nor how to relent. It is a torrential surge of misgiving and misdirection that bides no hour and keeps no banks. It is the strongest emotion known to man, for it has no gradations, no preludes, and no convalescence. It leaps fully armed and full-grown upon the jealous brain, and gives no peace to the jealous nor if possible to the jealoused. In man or woman it conspires and consummates the acts of madness and crime, which are sometimes but only pardoned to those who act under stress of emotional love.

Jealousy is the perversion of Love. It is unto Love what the Apples of Sodom are to the fragrant orange-blossom. It is even what Atheism is to Faith, and Turpitude is to Sanctity; and perhaps great lovers must tread along the gulf of Jealousy just as the great contemplatives never realise the divine ecstasy until after they have sighted the appalling abyss which may be described as Time without God, otherwise Hell, for Heaven is God without Time.

Jealousy is more cruel than Love, though Love, in all conscience, is cruel enough. Love more often destroys the lover than the beloved, but Jealousy seeks only the destruction of the jealoused. Jealousy is the diseased elephantiasis of sentiment, Love smitten to leprosy! Vision the divine and rosy Eros suddenly turned into a leper white as snow! Vision the once resilient and rainbowed wings caked and cracked like the flukes of a rotten fungus! Vision the delicate little limbs puffed and pustuled, and the divine brow puckered and blistered, the mother-of-pearl ears chipped and chapped, the mouth opened like an old wound instead of a fresh budding rose! Vision the eye rotting wickedly into its cavity—and even so you have not sufficiently symbolised Jealousy, the bane of mankind, and apparently of godkind as well, since it is written that they include some who are jealous!

John Goldenough was jealous, yet he was highly respectable. He was the active and reliable head of the firm of Goldenough Brothers, the famous plumbers, whose plumbing had accompanied the flag and made the remotest and most tropical countries sanitatious to their conquerors.

The Goldenough plumbing had won medals at every exhibition since the Great Exhibition of 1851, when a diploma signed by the Prince Consort had been awarded to the head of the firm. Miniature products of the firm adorned the famous Doll’s House, minutely constructed by the experts and artists of the British Empire, and delighted Royalty, young and old, by their realistic efficiency. It was the boast of John Goldenough’s father that the sun never set on Goldenough plumbing. Be that as it may, John Goldenough was a very jealous man.

Commercially he was jealous. It was not only domestically that he cherished this cancer. Otherwise he was unimaginative. With an assured competence of means he devoted himself to the comfort of himself and his family. He was not yet forty, and he was the head of Goldenough Brothers. Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-five. John Goldenough was the flower of British bourgeoisie, and he might be said to incarnate the Nonconformist Conscience. There was nothing against him at Bank or Chapel, unless in the arcana of his heart he possibly kept something against himself. He was a jealous man, that was all. But human society understood and appreciated his jealousy, for, if it constrained him to narrow ideas, it led to impeccable business honesty. He was jealous to a farthing in the accounts of his firm or of himself.

But he was also jealous of family affections, though this the world considered rather creditable, touching almost. He could not allow himself to be supplanted in the home circle for a moment even by another member of the same family. In fact there was a dark page to his record which only his subconscious memory reflected from the darkened mirror of the past. As the first-born he had been adored by his mother until his nerves became restive if they were not basking in the sunlight of her maternal hyperpossession. He felt ill if she was not worrying or fussing herself over him. He expected and required not only her attention but her continued and foolish infatuation. When her second son was born he became furiously jealous.

During these long ante-natal months she had shown herself less and less absorbed in him, and he had become conscious of some impending rival. Uneasily he sensed that her adoration was being drained elsewhere, and the moment his baby brother arrived, he knew that he must take second place. Jealousy ran like secret poison into his every tissue and vein, though he was too young to know or understand what and why he felt. Possibly he was no more responsible for his jealousy than for having the measles. Anyhow, he bided his opportunity perhaps unconsciously, but sullen and pertinacious. He watched his baby brother being soothed and swaddled, pampered and christened. It was a little more he felt than he could stand. Months passed, and the new baby occupied more and more of the nursery space and more and more of his mother’s affection. After six months the baby was introduced into the night nursery as well. A nurse slept between the two brothers while a nightlight floated in a basin of water in the middle of the room. One night John found himself wandering round the room in a state of horror. Nightmare was upon him. He felt he was being cramped and suffocated by the new baby. Fear mingled with jealousy and self-preservation shot the speckled spectrum of his hatred. In a violent effort to be rid of the besetting menace he picked the nightlight out of its watery cage, and threw it upon the barely moving heap of down. A light flame flickered into the air, but John had skipped back into bed before the baby cried, and the nurse awoke too late to put out the flames. In vain was the alarm given. By the time the household had quenched the fire, baby was singed and suffocated to death, partly by the smoke and partly by the efforts made to extinguish the last spark. Through the house rang one piercing cry—the cry of Rachel mourning, the cry that from the beginning to the end of the world can never be appeased, the inconsolable cry of a mother wailing for her child.

John was only six at the time of the tragedy, but from that moment his restlessness disappeared. He was no longer troubled by nightmare, and continued on his former course like a normal and well-behaved little boy. Of necessity his mother renewed and redoubled the old affection for her only son. Years began to pass, untroubled and undimmed for either. The pathetic and beautiful mother idealised and idolised her son. He repaid her with an adoration that was partly a reflected adoration of himself. There was no rival. He had no brother, and she had no lover, and each thought the other perfect. She never dared marry one of the very many suitable suitors who appeared on the scene after her husband’s death. John’s jealousy was always enough to scare her. He always slept beside her, and she would not face or contemplate the days and nights when she must relegate him to the attic. She liked to be near him in case he stirred or cried in the dark. She was not content with being his night nurse. She became his governess and would let no one teach him except herself. They became more intimately involved in each other’s lives than they had been before his birth. They had been the same body. Now they were the same soul and mind, and he was the dominant. It seemed forgotten that there had ever been a baby brother.

It was true even in her case that the mother can never forget the child she has borne, but she saw both the boys in the survivor. Without the least suspicion of the distant crime she innocently loved the slayer and the slain with one passionate and abiding love. The plasticity of boyhood wiped all trace from his memory. He was not conscious of his one awful act of infantile incendiarism. But in the lower levels of his nature it still lay memorified like one of those buried fossils by which the gentle earth remembers her past monsters. And close to the hushed record under the running surface stream of daily life lay the dismal dragon of Jealousy, but no fossil. It was always there, though it was given no inducement or provocation to break forth. It had lain there waiting while Master John became a schoolboy, and a successful one. He had gained too many prizes and enjoyed too many successes to feel the least dislike or envy or disgust of others at school. He took a successful course at the University, and after coming of age he took over his deceased father’s business. He was a born plumber, a Master-plumber, and in fact he proved the Empire’s Super-plumber. Tubs, piping, lavabos, taps, sinks and shower-baths were his sphere. He applied not merely intelligence but genius to the problems of Imperial Sanitation. He received an Indian decoration and a testimonial from an Australian Premier. He prolonged the lives of the Royal Family more than all the prayers in the Prayer Book on their behalf.

Respectability demanded only one thing further. He must marry. His mother had long dreaded the day when she would be supplanted herself. She had kept herself free for him. It was more than she could expect that he should keep himself eternally free for her. As she had been nurse, governess and playmate, sister and mother to him, she would doubtless, had they lived in a Ptolemaic civilisation, been ready to sacrifice herself yet further. But happily the Nonconformist Conscience takes a rather sturdy stand. So when John Goldenough married the daughter of the chief clerk in his own firm, his mother was glad enough to be allowed to remain as their housekeeper.

John Goldenough’s wife was more than pretty. The daughter of an employee who had risen with the years in the Goldenough employ, without pretence of blood or breeding, she appreciated the social honour which had been paid her, and was loyally prepared to merge her personality and prospects in the Lord of Sanitation, who had fallen in love as much with her love for him as with her pretty little face. Unwittingly he had transferred to her the whole accumulated sleeping powers of jealousy, with which as a child he had surrounded his mother. As little witting, she mistook the jealous symptoms for an excess of love for herself. His mother slowly sank into a second place that was lower than servile. She never murmured when he took her rings and gave them to his sweetheart. It was no theft, for he slipped them from her fingers while she sat sadly watching and mutely wondering. She realised that he was sloughing the old love for the new, and she felt the prick of sacrifice when she saw the stones glitter on the wife’s fingers the following night. She knew that she had been replaced utterly and for ever. Then it was that she began to mourn that she had never dared have other children because she had been terrified by her son’s queer jealousies. But she had had the pleasure of spoiling him. It was spoiled goods in a way that she was passing on to another, if that could be any satisfaction to her.

John Goldenough’s love for his wife passed by the path of passion into jealousy, his underlying and besetting mood. Jealousy is as delicious a sauce as can flick the palate of a woman, who is in love with the man who exercises jealousy on her behalf. But when her love has been worn to boredom and only a stump of convention marks the spot where once grew the fairy tree of their romance, jealousy thrives like poison-ivy round the dead wood. During the first ten years of their marriage John Goldenough had forbidden his wife to bear him children, partly out of a sense of economy and partly, though this he never admitted, because he wished to keep his wife’s love concentrated upon himself.

Himself an only son, he intended to have an only son towards the end of his married life, and thought it perfectly appropriate and proper to keep his issue within this drastic limitation. He liked to feel her sentimental as well as her material dependence upon him. This dependence he thought could be prolonged while she was childless. That she should entertain an admirer had hardly crossed his imagination. As it was, he could not bear other men to sit beside her at table, and the politest and most constrained givers of compliments to his wife were thrown into terrified exit. In the end neither his friends nor hers cared to call, esteeming themselves fortunate if he showed himself merely nervous and not in some way objectionable. He had been jealous at different times of her mother-in-law and even of her maidservant. She was compelled to shed them both. If his love had become jealousy, hers had become fear.

Despairing of finding some anchor for the desire she still had to love something, she let a child live and quicken under her heart. It was some time before she let her husband know what was coming. When he realised it, all his queerness came to the surface. Though he hung around her still like a hawk around a chicken coop, he showed no gentler shade of feeling toward her. His eyes seemed to pass through her and to strike into the oblique future. However interesting she might have become, he was no longer interested in her personally. His mind and soul were concentrated on the coming child, of whom he quickly became jealous to the exclusion even of the poor all-including mother. The sense of paternal possession proved stronger than any marital pride. As father of the coming child he demanded some sympathy and praise, and finally took to his bed in expectation of visits, gifts, and finally congratulations.

John Goldenough’s thoughts carried him afar. The occasion was solemn enough in all conscience. It was possible that a future head of Goldenough Brothers was shortly approaching the earth. If the child were male, what a vista opened before the heir and successor of himself! In political circles a Plumbing Peerage had already been mooted, and if Plumbing, like Beer, Shipyards and tintacks, was to produce a Peerage, who could be more suitable than John Goldenough? To the man in the street the plumbing age was synchronous with the rise and fame of the great firm. And each time that John Goldenough’s name was mentioned, the pulse of every plumber in the Empire beat higher. It was an heir to his future Peerage that he imagined. He could not sufficiently impress upon his wife the care, the thought, and the isolation which must surround her in a prospect of such importance. Dull and listless, she awaited the days of dreariness; the weeks of weariness, which prelude motherhood. He had caused her to occupy a room at the end of the passage, in which he himself lay camped, intercepting her presents and friends, and taking up more of the doctor’s time than the patient herself. He felt a new importance, and demanded the same reverence in the home that he received in the plumbing world. He resented every attention she received, all of which in some oblique process of thought he wished to be applied to himself. The child was his, and he felt an uncontrollable sense of possession welling under his sense of pompous pride. He grudged every moment that the child remained part of its mother. He longed for the speedy dissolution of their company, when he could take the child into his arms and show the world that it was his and his only.

The moment came unexpectedly, for neither the doctor nor nurse was under the roof when John Goldenough was awakened from sleep by the premature groans of his wife. He roused himself and hurried into the room in which she was confined. He stumbled twice and switched on the light with delay. To his horror he saw that he was late. The child had been born! He rushed to the bell to ring the alarm and to bring medical aid. Then he hesitated, rushed to the bedside and lifted the baby into the awaiting cot and blanket. It was a boy, and a fierce burst of pride and satisfaction outweighed any anxiety rising in his mind for the mother, who lay quietly breathing in the exhaustion of accomplished pain. It was a boy! That was the great thing. Goldenough Brothers would be perpetuated through the ages!

Vistas of cosmic thought swept through his brain during those seconds. He looked back unto the foundation of Goldenough Brothers if not as far as the beginning of the world, and he looked ahead and saw the firm majestically installed around the world. Where the name of Goldenough was not known was simply not civilisation; that was all. If he had had imagination, his mind might have visualised the firm in Biblical guise contracting for the water-pipes of Babel. But his social and personal pride was sufficient to inspire him to mutter, “John, second Lord Goldenough,” as he lifted and laid down the infant. He covered him with the blanket and returned to the bell. With his finger upon the knob again he hesitated. He heard an arresting groan from his wife. It was the first notice he had taken of her. Once more his thought flashed ahead murkily, and he foresaw her recovery, her maternal triumph, her possession of his boy, perhaps as intimate and absorbing as his mother’s devotion to himself. And he shuddered with jealousy. It was his boy and he wanted no mother’s tender care to soften the strong abiding bond between father and son. He glanced at the child’s cot. In the far past of buried deeds and dead thoughts he recalled a child’s cot similar to this one. It gave him a dreamy sensation of some previous existence, some underground occurrences, but very far back. He could not recollect the circumstance, but the sight of the baby in the cot filled him with a vivid and fierce desire to be rid of something. Flaming jealousy demanded blood. His eye fell full on his wife, and a passion of murderous envy coloured the very retina of his eye. He could not bear to think that the success, the joy and the satisfaction of the boy’s birth would redound to her. He would have liked to kill her, and to throw the nightlight upon the sheets if he could be certain that they would have risen in solid, enveloping, destroying flame. His finger still hovered on the unpressed bell. The alarm had not been given, and it crossed the cunning of his frantic mind that, if he waited a while, perhaps she would die of her own exhaustion. She had not recovered consciousness. Perhaps she never would.

He stood feeling the bell knob. She gave another deep groan, and moved as though in helpless signal for aid. He guessed that she was slowly expiring of hæmorrhage. The baby was quiet, and he needed only to stand there waiting and watching till the right moment came to sound the bell. He would be found there striving to save her by her bedside, the perfect type of the mourning, maladroit husband. It was a question of timing the doctor’s arrival in order that it might appear that everything had been done, but that the Hand of God had been lifted against good Brother Goldenough, so prosperous and happy in all other affairs of life. In his mind he was already dictating the notices which would appear in the local Press in edifying eulogy of his dead wife and in considerate sympathy for himself. His finger trembled on the bell. Still he waited. A rattle of breath had begun to sound in her uncovered throat. Her broken body began to heave like a rudderless ship. Then she fell quiet and seemed to sink like a corpse under the debris of the bed. With a calm finger John Goldenough deliberately rang the electric bell.

The house was roused, but it was half an hour before the doctor arrived in a terrible state of anxiety. He had confidently prophesied the birth for the following week. Meantime hysterical maids had chafed his wife’s hands and poured brandy into her icy mouth. The doctor felt her pulse and turned aside to the baby, which he lifted and examined with continued anxiety. John Goldenough had retired, leaving the medical profession to clear his work.

Returning to his room he waited for the first bulletin. Nurses arrived and the doctor’s colleagues were summoned. Apparently she was making a fight of it yet. An hour passed.

The doctor, with a ghastly face, presented himself at John Goldenough’s door. “I am sorry to have to bring such bad news.”

John Goldenough looked up with assumed despair. “My poor wife, my poor wife!” he said, and buried his face with much fantastic sobbing in his hands.

The doctor laid his hand on his shoulder and said: “Your wife, I am happy to say, will live, though she has had a narrow escape.”

John Goldenough stood upright. “What is your bad news, then?” he asked feebly.

“The boy is dead. He must have been born an hour before my arrival. His umbilical cord was never fastened, and he bled to death. If I could have arrived only half an hour sooner!” And he passed out.