The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married LifeGibbs, Philip
Science
The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life
Gibbs, Philip
Domestic fiction; Married people -- Fiction
And so they stare into each other’s soul, and take hands again like
little children, abandoned by the Wicked Uncles of life, and they grope
their way back to primitive things, and begin the journey again. They
have found out that this new comradeship is better even than the old
romantic love of their courting days. They have discovered something
of the great secret of life. They are humbled. They make new pledges to
each other, pick up the broken pieces of their hopes and dreams and
fit them together again in a new and sounder scheme. This time, in some
cases, they do not leave the baby out of the business. The wife becomes
a mother, and the child chases away all the ghosts which haunted her in
the Eighth Year. She no longer wants to take flight. She has been called
back.
It is nearly always some accident like this which calls the wife back,
some sudden, startling change in the situation, caused by outside
influences, or by the hand of Fate. Sometimes it is an illness which
overtakes the husband or wife. Holding hands by the bedside, they
stare into the face of Death, and again the trivialities of life, the
pettiness of their previous desires, the folly of their selfishness, the
stupidity of their little snobdom, are revealed by the whisperings of
Death, and by its warnings. The truth of things stalks into the bedroom
where the husband, or the wife, lies sleeping on the borderland. About
the sick bed the weeping woman makes new vows, tears wash out her
vanity, her self-conceit. Or, kneeling by the side of the woman whose
transparent hand he clasps above the coverlet, the husband listens to
the little voice within his conscience, and understands, with a great
heartache, the pitiful meaning of the domestic strife which seemed
to have killed his love for the woman for whose life now he makes a
passionate cry. In the period of convalescence, after Death has stolen
away, when life smiles again through the open windows, that man and
woman get back to sanity and to wisdom beyond that of common-sense. They
begin again with new ideals. Perhaps in a little while one of the rooms
becomes a nursery. They get back to the joy of youth, once more the
woman has been called back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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