EVE’S SENSE OF THE LIMITATIONS OF LIFE
Eve’s London moods began to be more complex, and tinged with discontent.
The homelessness of the great city depressed her. She felt its chaotic
vastness, knowing all the while that there was ordered purpose behind
all its seeming chaos, and that all its clamour and hurry and crowded
interplay of energies had meaning and significance. There were some few
men who ruled, and who perhaps understood, but the crowd! She knew
herself to be one of the crowd driven forward by necessity that barked
like a brisk sheepdog round and about a drove of sheep. Sometimes her
mood was one of passionate resentment. London was so abominably ugly,
and the eternal and seemingly senseless hurry tired her brain and her
eyes. She had no cockney instincts, and the characteristic smells of the
great city aroused no feeling of affectionate satisfaction. The odours
connected with burnt oil and petrol, pickle and jam factories, the
laying of asphalt, breweries, Covent Garden, the Meat Market, had no
familiar suggestiveness. Nor did the shops interest her for the moment.
She had left the more feminine part of herself at Fernhill, and was
content to wear black.
London gave her to the full the “damned anonymous” feeling, making her
realise that she had no corner of her very own. The best of us have some
measure of sensitive egoism, an individuality that longs to leave its
personal impress upon something, even on the sand by the seashore, and
London is nothing but a great, trampled cattle-pen, where thousands of
hoofs leave nothing but a churn of mud. People build pigeon houses in
their back yards, or train nasturtiums up strings, when they live down
by Stepney. Farther westwards it is the sensitive individualism that
makes many a Londoner country mad. The self-conscious self resents the
sameness, the crowding mediocrity, the thousands of little tables that
carry the same food for thousands of people, the thousands of seats in
indistinguishable buses and cars, the thousands of little people who
rush on the same little errands along the pavements. For there is a
bitter uniformity even in the midst of a luxurious variety, when the
purse limits the outlook, and a week at Southend-on-Sea may be the
wildest of life’s adventures.
Eve began to have the country hunger very badly. Autumn had gone, and
the winter rains and fogs had set in, and her thoughts went back to
Fernhill as she remembered it in summer, and as she imagined it in
autumn. What a green and spacious world she had left. The hush of the
pine woods on a windless day, when nothing moved save an occasional
squirrel. The blaze of roses in June. The blue horizons, the great white
clouds sailing, the purple heathland, the lush valleys with their
glimmerings of water! What autumn pictures rose before her, tantalising
her sense of beauty. She saw the bracken turning bronze and gold, the
larch woods changing to amber, the maples and beeches flaming pyres of
saffron, scarlet and gold. Those soft October mornings with the grass
grey with dew, and the sunlight struggling with white mists. She began
to thirst for beauty, and it was a thirst that picture galleries could
not satisfy.
Even that last letter of hers to Canterton toned with her feeling of
cramped finality. She had written “No,” but often her heart cried “Yes,”
with an impetuous yearning towards sympathy and understanding. What a
masterful and creative figure was his when she compared him with these
thousands of black-coated men who scuttled hither and thither on
business that was someone else’s. She felt that she could be content
with more spiritual things, with a subtle perfume of life that made this
City existence seem gross and material and petty.
Her daily walks from Highbury to Miss Champion’s helped to accentuate
the tendencies of these moods of hers. Sometimes Kate Duveen would walk
a great part of the way back with her, and Eve, who was the more
impressionable of the two, led her friend into many suggestive
discussions. Upper Street, Islington, saddened her. It seemed so typical
of the social scheme from which she was trying to escape.
“Doesn’t all this make you feel that it is a city of slaves?”
“That depends, perhaps, on one’s digestion.”
“But does it? These people are slaves, without knowing it. Things are
thrust on them, and they think they choose.”
“Nothing but suggestion, after all.”
“Look, I will show you.”
Eve stopped in front of a picture shop.
“What’s your opinion of all that is in there?”
“Hopeless, sentimental tosh, of course. But it suits the people.”
“It is what is given them, and they take it. There is not one thing in
that window that has any glimmer of genius, or even of distinction.”
“What do you expect in Islington?”
“I call it catering for slaves, and that worst sort of slavery that does
not realise its own condition.”
They walked on and passed a bookshop. Eve turned back.
“Look again!”
Kate Duveen laughed.
“I suppose, for instance, that annoys you?”
She pointed to a row of a dozen copies of a very popular novel written
by a woman, and called “The Renunciation.”
“It does annoy me.”
“That toshy people rave over tosh! A friend of mine knows the authoress.
She is a dowdy little bourgeoise who lives in a country town, and they
tell me that book has made her ten thousand pounds. She thinks she has a
mission, and that she is a second George Eliot.”
“Doesn’t it annoy you?”
“Why should it? Fools’ money for a fool’s tale. What do you expect? I
suppose donkeys think that there is nothing on earth like a donkey’s
braying!”
“All the same, it helps my argument, that these people are slaves, only
capable of swallowing just what is given them.”
“I dare say you are right. We ought to change a lot of this in the next
fifty years!”
“I wonder. You see, he taught me a good deal, in the country, about
growth and evolution, and all that has come from the work of Mendel, De
Vries and Bates. He doesn’t believe in London. He called it an orchid
house, and said he preferred a few wholesome and indigenous weeds.”
“All the more reason for believing that this sort of London won’t last.
We shall get something better.”
“We may do, if we can get rid of some of the politicians.”
It was about this time that Eve began to realise the limitations of her
present life, and to look towards a very problematical future. It seemed
more than probable that “means to the end” would absorb all her
energies, and that the end itself would never arrive. She found that her
hack work was growing more and more supreme, and that she had no leisure
for her own art. She felt tired at night, and on Saturdays she was more
tempted to go to a theatre than to sit at home in Bosnia Road and try to
produce pictures. Sundays, too, became sterile. She stayed in bed till
ten, and when she had had breakfast she found the suburban atmosphere
weighing upon her spirits. Church bells rang; decorous people in Sunday
clothes passed her window on their way to church or chapel. If she went
for a walk she everywhere met a suggestion of respectable relaxation
that dominated her energies and sent her home depressed and cynical. As
for the afternoons, they were spoilt for her by Mr. Albert Buss’s banjo,
though how his genteel mother reconciled herself to banjo-playing on a
Sunday Eve could not imagine. Three or four friends joined him. Eve saw
them saunter in at the gate, with dandy canes, soft hats, and an air of
raw doggishness. They usually stared hard at her window. The walls and
floors were thin, and Eve could hear much that they said, especially
when Mrs. Buss went out for her afternoon walk, and left the “nuts”
together. They talked about horse-racing and girls.
“She’s a little bit of all right!”
“You bet!”
“Ain’t afraid to go home in the dark!”
“What sort of young lady’s the lodger, Bert? Anything on?”
“Not my style. Ain’t taking any!”
“Go on, you don’t know how to play up to a girl. I’d get round anything
in London.”
Just about dusk Mr. Buss and his friends sauntered out on love
adventures, and Mrs. Buss sat down at her piano and sung hymns with a
sort of rolling, throaty gusto. Eve found it almost unendurable, so much
so that she abandoned the idea of trying to use her Sundays at Bosnia
Road, and asked Kate Duveen to let her spend the day with her in
Bloomsbury.
On weekdays, when it happened to be fine and not too cold, she and Kate
would spend the twenty minutes after lunch in St. James’s Park, sitting
on a seat and watching the irrepressible sparrows or the machinations of
a predatory cat. The bare trees stood out against the misty blue of the
London horizon, and even when the sun shone, the sunlight seemed very
thin and feeble. Other people sat on the seats, and read, or ate food
out of paper bags. Very rarely were these people conversational. They
appeared to have many thoughts to brood over, and nothing to say.
Kate Duveen had noticed a change in Eve. There was a different look in
her eyes. She, too, was less talkative, and sometimes a cynical note
came into her voice.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Was I thinking?”
“You haven’t said anything for five minutes.”
“One can be conscious of an inner atmosphere, without calling it
thought.”
“Much fog about?”
Some of the sensitive fire came back into Eve’s eyes.
“Kate, I am horribly afraid of being crushed—of becoming one of the
crowd. It seems to me that one may never have time to be oneself.”
“You mean that the effort to live leaves no margin?”
“That’s it. I suppose most of us find in the end that we are the slaves
of our hack work, and that our ambitions die of slow starvation. Think
of it. Think of the thousands of people who had something to do or say,
and were smothered by getting a living.”
“It’s the usual thing. I felt it myself. I nearly gave up; but I set my
teeth and scratched. I’ve determined to fight through—to refuse to be
smothered. I’ll get my independence, somehow.”
“Sometimes I feel that I must throw up all this bread and butter stuff,
and stake everything on one adventure.”
“Then don’t do it. I have seen people try it. Ninety-nine out of the
hundred come back broken, far worse off than they were before. They’re
humble, docile things for the rest of their lives. Carry the harness
without a murmur. Not a kick left, I know.”
“I have been thinking of a secretaryship. It might give me more
leisure—breathing space——”
“Try it!”
“Are you being ironical?”
“Not a bit. I’ll speak to Miss Champion. She’s not a bad sort, so long
as you are tweety-tweety and never cause any complications.”
“I wish you would speak to her.”
“I will.”
Kate Duveen had peculiar influence with Miss Champion, perhaps because
she was not afraid of her. Miss Champion thought her a very sound and
reliable young woman, a young woman whose health and strength seemed
phenomenal, and who never caused any friction by going down with
influenza, and so falling into arrears with her work. Kate Duveen had
made herself a very passable linguist. She could draw, type, scribble
shorthand, do book-keeping, write a good magazine article or edit the
ladies’ page of a paper. Every year she spent her three weeks’ holiday
abroad, and had seen a good deal of Germany, Italy and France. Miss
Champion always said that Kate Duveen had succeeded in doing a very
difficult thing—combining versatility with efficiency.
“So Miss Carfax would like a secretaryship? I suppose you think her
suitable?”
“There is not a safer girl in London.”
“I understand you. Because she has looks.”
“I think you can ignore them. She is very keen to get on.”
“Very well. I will look out for something to suit her.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss Champion. I believe in Eve Carfax.”
* * * * *