WOMAN’S WAR
It was during these last weeks at Bosnia Road that Eve became fully
conscious of that spirit of revolt that is one of the dominating
features of contemporary life, for she was experiencing in her own
person the thoughts and tendencies of a great movement, suffering its
discontents, feeling its hopes and passions.
When she tried to analyse these tendencies in herself, she was
confronted with the disharmonies of her life, disharmonies that reacted
all the more keenly on a generous and impulsive nature. She was
necessary to nobody, not even to the man who had thought that it would
be pleasant to marry her, for she knew that in a month he would be as
contented as ever with his old bachelor life. She had no personal
corner, no sacred place full of the subtle and pleasant presence of the
individual “I.” She had none of the simple and primitive
responsibilities that provide many women with a natural and organic
satisfaction.
A new class had arisen, the class of the unattached working women, and
she was sharing the experiences of thousands. It was a sense of
defencelessness that angered her. She had no weapon. She could only
retaliate upon society by shutting her mouth and holding her head a
little higher. Her individuality was threatened. She was denied the
chance of living a life of self-expression, and was told with casual
cynicism that she must do such work as society chose to offer her, or
starve.
Of course, there were the chances of escape, the little, secret, fatal
doorways that men were willing to leave open. Some women availed
themselves of these opportunities, nor was Eve so prejudiced as to
imagine that all women were martyrs and less hot blooded than the men.
She had had the same doors opened to her. She might have become a
mistress, or have married a man who was physically distasteful to her,
and she understood now why many women were so bitter against anything
that was male. It was not man, but the sex spirit, and all its meaner
predilections.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred concerned themselves with nothing but a
woman’s face and figure. They reacted to physical impressions, and Eve
realised the utter naturalness of it all. The working woman had got
outside the old conventions. She was trying to do unsexual things, and
to talk an unsexual language to men who had not changed. It was like
muddling up business and sentiment, and created an impossible position,
so long as the male nature continued to react in the way it did. Sexual
solicitation or plain indifference, these were the two extreme fates
that bounded the life of the working woman.
Eve told herself that there were exceptions, but that society, in the
mass, moved along these lines. She had listened to Kate Duveen—Kate
Duveen, who was a fanatic, and who had made it her business to look into
the conditions under which working women lived. The shop-girl, the
servant, the waitress, the clerk, the typist, the chorus-girl, the
street-walker; always they held in their hands the bribe that men
desired, that bribe so fatal to the woman when once it had been given.
Eve began to understand the spirit of revolt by the disgust that was
stirred in her own heart. This huge sexual machine. This terrible,
primitive groundwork upon which all the shades of civilisation were
tagged like threads of coloured silk. There was some resemblance here
between the reaction of certain women against sex, and the reaction of
the early Christians against the utter physical smell of the Roman
civilisation. To live, one must be born again. One must triumph over the
senses. One must refuse to treat with men on the old physical
understanding. They are the cries of extremists, and yet of an extremity
that hopes to triumph by urging a passionate and protesting celibacy. A
million odd women in the United Kingdom, over-setting the sex balance,
and clamouring, many of them, that they will not be weighed in the old
sexual scale.
Eve caught the spirit of rebellion, divorced as she was from any
comradeship with men. It is so much easier to quarrel with the
hypothetical antagonists whom one meets in the world of one’s own brain.
Bring two prejudiced humans together, get them to talk like reasonable
beings, and each may have some chance of discovering that the other is
not the beast that he or she had imagined. It is when masses of people
segregate and refuse to mix that war becomes more than probable.
Insensibly, yet very surely, Eve began to imbibe this feeling of
antagonism. It made her take sides, even when she happened to read the
account of some law case in the paper. And this tacit antagonism abetted
her in her refusal to accept the cheap labour that society, “male
society,” she called it, chose to offer her. It behoved women to stand
out against male exploitation, even if they had to suffer for the
moment. Yet her revolt was still an individual revolt. She had not
joined herself to the crowd. She wanted to complete her personal
experiences before associating herself with the great mass of
discontent, and she meant to go through to the end—to touch all the
realities. Perhaps she was a little feverish in her sincerity. She had
been ill. She had been badly fed. She had been worried, and she was in a
mood that demanded that specious sort of realism that is to the truth
what a statue is to the living body.
Her last morning at Bosnia Road turned out to be warm and sunny. She was
ready to smile at contrasts, and to draw them with a positive and
perverse wilfulness. Breakfast was just like other breakfasts, only
different. The brown teapot with the chip out of its lid stood there,
familiar yet ironical. The marmalade dish, with its pinky roses and
silver-plated handle that was wearing green, reminded her that it would
meet her eyes no more. The patchwork tea-cosy was like a fat and
sentimental old lady who was always exclaiming, “Oh, dear, what a wicked
world it is!” Even the egg-cup, with its smudgy blue pattern, had a
ridiculous individuality of its own. Eve felt a little emotional and
more than a little morbid, and ready to laugh at herself because a
teapot and an egg-cup made her moralise.
She had packed all her belongings, paid Mrs. Buss, and ordered a
“growler” to call at half-past ten. The cabman was punctual. He came
into the narrow hall, rubbing his boots on the doormat, a cheerful
ancient, a bolster of clothes, and looking to be in perpetual proximity
to breathlessness and perspiration. He laid his old top-hat on the floor
beside the staircase, and went up to struggle with Eve’s boxes.
Mrs. Buss had let Eve’s rooms, and had nothing to complain of. For the
time being her attention was concentrated on seeing that the cabman did
not knock the paint off the banisters.
“Do be careful now!”
A red-faced man was descending under the shadow of a big black trunk.
“All right, mum. Don’t you worry, mum!”
He breathed hard and diffused a scent of the stable.
“Them chaps as builds ’ouses don’t think of the luggidge and
foornitoore. ’Old up, there!”
A corner of the trunk jarred against the wall and left a gash in the
paper. Mrs. Buss made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“There, didn’t I say!”
“Did I touch anythink?”
“Now, mind the hat-stand! And the front door was painted three months
ago.”
“Don’t you worry, mum. It ain’t the first time luggidge and me ’as gone
out walkin’ together!”
Mrs. Buss turned to Eve who was standing in the sitting-room doorway.
“That’s just the British working-man to a T. He earns his living by
doing one thing all his life, and he does it badly. My poor husband
found that out before he died. I do hope I’ve made you feel comfortable
and homely? I always try to do my best.”
“I’m sure you do.”
She was glad when the loading up business was over, and she was driving
away between the dull little houses.
Eve had written to book a room at a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, an hotel
that had been brought into being by the knocking together of three
straight-faced, dark-bricked old houses. She drove first to the hotel,
left a light trunk and a handbag there, and then ordered the cabman to
go on to Charing Cross where she left the rest of her luggage in the
keeping of the railway company.
A sudden sense of freedom came over her when she walked out of the
station enclosure, after paying and tipping the driver of the growler,
who was surprised at the amount of the tip. She had been delivered from
suburbia, and her escape from Bosnia Road made her the more conscious of
the largeness and the stimulating complexity of life. She felt a new
exhilaration, and a sense of adventure that glimpsed more spacious
happenings. It was more like the mood that is ascribed to the young man
who rides out alone, tossing an audacious sword.
Eve decided to treat herself to a good lunch for once, and she walked to
Kate Duveen’s Italian restaurant in Soho, and amplified and capped the
meal with a half bottle of claret, coffee, and a liqueur. She guessed
that she had plenty of Aerated Bread shop meals before her. After lunch
she took a motor-bus to the Marble Arch, wandered into the park, and
down to the Serpentine, and discovering an empty seat, took the
opportunity of reviewing her finances. She found that she had five
pounds sixteen shillings and fivepence left. The Bloomsbury hotel
charged four and sixpence for bed and breakfast, and she would be able
to stay there for some three weeks, if she had the rest of her meals at
tea-shops and cheap restaurants.
Eve sat there for an hour, watching the glimmer of the water and the
moving figures, growing more and more conscious of the vast, subdued
murmur that drifted to her from beyond the bare trees. Neither the pitch
nor the volume of the sound varied, though it was pierced now and again
by the near note of a motor horn. The murmur went on and on, grinding
out its under-chant that was made up of the rumbling of wheels, the
plodding of hoofs, the hooting of horns, the rattle and pant of
machinery, the voices of men and women. This green space seemed a spot
of silence in the thick of a whirl of throbbing, quivering movement. She
had always hated London traffic, but to-day it had something to say to
her.
The sun shone, the spring was in, and it was warm there, sitting on the
seat. The water blinked, sparrows chirped, waterfowl uttered their
cries, children played, daffodils were in bloom. Eve felt herself moving
suddenly to a fuller consciousness of modern life. Her brain seemed to
pulsate with it, to glow with a new understanding.
Conquest! She could understand the feverish and half savage passion for
conquest that seized many men. To climb above the crowd, to get money,
to assert one’s individuality, brutally perhaps, but at all costs and
against all comers. People got trampled on, trodden under. It was a
stampede, and the stronger and the more selfish animals survived. Yet
society had some sort of legal conscience. It had to make some show of
clearing up its rubbish and its wreckage. The pity of it was that there
was so much “afterthought,” when “forethought” might have saved so much
disease and disaster.
She pictured to herself all those women and girls working over yonder,
the seamstresses and milliners, the clerks, typists, shop-girls,
waitresses, factory hands, _filles de joie_—what a voiceless, helpless
crowd it seemed. Was the clamour for the vote a mere catch cry, one of
those specious demagogic phrases that pretended to offer so much and
would effect so little? Was it not the blind, passionate cry of a mass
of humanity that desired utterance and yearned for self-expression?
Could anything be altered, or was life just a huge, fateful phenomenon
that went its inevitable way, despite all the talk and the fussy little
human figures? She wondered. How were things going to be bettered? How
were the sex spirit and the commercial spirit going to be chastened and
subdued?
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