EVE PURSUES EXPERIENCE
During the next two weeks Eve’s moods fluctuated between compassionate
altruism and bitter and half laughing scorn. Life was so tremendous, so
pathetic, so strenuous, so absurd. For the time being she was a watcher
of other people’s activities, and she spent much of her time tramping
here, there and everywhere, interested in everything because of her new
prejudices. She was glad to get out of the hotel, since it was full of a
certain type of American tourists—tall, sallow women who talked in
loud, harsh voices, chiefly about food and the digestion of food, where
they had been, and what they had paid for things. The American man was a
new type to Eve—a mongrel still in the making. The type puzzled and
repelled her with its broad features, and curious brown eyes generally
seen behind rimless glasses. Sometimes she sat and watched them and
listened, and fancied she caught a note of hysterical egoism. Their
laughter was not like an Englishman’s laughter. It burst out suddenly
and rather fatuously, betraying, despite all the jaw setting and grim
hunching of shoulders, a lack of the deeper restraints. They were always
talking, always squaring themselves up against the rest of the world,
with a neurotic self-consciousness that realised that it was still only
half civilised. They suggested to Eve people who had set out to absorb
culture in a single generation, and had failed most grotesquely. She
kept an open mind as to the men, but she disliked the women
wholeheartedly. They were studies in black and white, and crude, harsh
studies, with no softness of outline.
One Sunday she walked to Hyde Park and saw some of the suffragist
speakers pelted with turf by a rowdily hostile crowd. The occasion
proved to be critical, so far as some of her tendencies were concerned.
Militancy had not appealed to her. There was too much of the “drunk and
disorderly” about it, too much spiteful screaming. It suggested a
reversion to savage, back-street methods, and Eve’s pride had refused to
indulge in futile and wholly undignified exhibitions of violence. There
were better ways of protesting than by kicking policemen’s shins,
breaking windows, and sneaking about at midnight setting fire to houses.
Yet when she saw these women pelted, hooted at, and threatened, the
spirit of partisanship fired up at the challenge.
She was on the outskirts of the crowd, and perhaps her pale and intent
face attracted attention. At all events, she found a lout, who looked
like a young shop-assistant, standing close beside her, and staring in
her face.
“Votes for women!”
His ironical shout was an accusation, and his eyes were the eyes of a
bully. And of a sudden Eve understood what it meant for a woman to have
to stand up and face the coarse male element in the crowd, all the young
cads who were out for horseplay. She was conscious of physical fear; a
shrinking from the bestial thoughtlessness of a mob that did things that
any single man would have been ashamed to do.
The fellow was still staring at her.
“Now, then, ‘Votes for Women!’ Own up!”
He jogged her with his elbow, and she kept a scornful profile towards
him, though trembling inwardly.
Someone interposed.
“You there, leave the young lady alone! She’s only listening like you
and me.”
The aggressor turned with a snarl, but found himself up against a
particularly big workman dressed in his Sunday clothes.
“You’re an old woman yourself.”
“Go home and sell stockings over the counter, and leave decent people
alone.”
Eve thanked the man with a look, and turned out of the crowd. The
workman followed her.
“’Scuse me, miss, I’ll walk to the gates with you. There are too many of
these young blackguard fools about.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’ve got a lot of sympathy with the women, but seems to me some of ’em
are on the wrong road.”
She looked at him interestedly. He was big and fresh coloured and quiet,
and reminded her in his coarser way of James Canterton.
“You think so?”
“It don’t do to lose your temper, even in a game, and that’s what some
of the women are doing. We’re reasonable sort of creatures, and it’s no
use going back to the old boot and claw business.”
“What they say is that they have tried reasoning, and that men would not
listen.”
He laughed.
“That’s rot! Excuse me, miss. You’ve got to give reason a chance, and a
pretty long chance. Do you think we working men won what we’ve got in
three months? You have to go on shoving and shoving, and in the end, if
you’ve got common sense on your side, you push the public through. You
can’t expect things turned all topsy-turvy in ten minutes, because a few
women get up on carts and scream. They ought to know better.”
“They say it is the only thing that’s left.”
His blue eyes twinkled.
“Not a bit of it, miss. The men were coming round. We’re better chaps,
better husbands and fathers than we were a hundred years ago. You know,
miss, a man ain’t averse to a decent amount of pleasant persuasion. It
don’t do to nag him, or he may tell you to go to blazes. Well, I wish
you good afternoon.”
They had reached the gates, and he touched the brim of his hard hat,
smiling down at her with shrewd kindness.
“I’m very grateful to you.”
He coloured up, and his smile broadened, and Eve walked away down Oxford
Street, doing some pregnant thinking.
The man had reminded her of Canterton. What was Canterton’s attitude
towards this movement, and what was her attitude to Canterton now that
she had touched more of the realities of life? When she came to analyse
her feelings she found that Canterton did not appear to exist for her in
the present. Fernhill and its atmosphere had become prehistoric. It had
removed into the Golden Age, above and beyond criticism, and she did not
include it in this world of struggling prejudices and aspirations. And
yet, when she let herself think of Canterton and Lynette, she felt less
sure of the sex antagonism that she was encouraging with scourge and
prayer. Canterton seemed to stand in the pathway of her advance, looking
down at her with eyes that smiled, eyes that were without mockery.
Moreover, something that he had once said to her kept opposing itself to
her arbitrary and enthusiastic pessimism. She could remember him stating
his views, and she could remember disagreeing with him.
He had said, “People are very much happier than you imagine.
Sentimentalists have always made too much of the woe of the world. There
is a sort of thing I call organic happiness, the active physical
happiness of the animal that is reasonably healthy. Of course we
grumble, but don’t make the mistake of taking grumbling for the cries of
discontented misery. I believe that most of the miserable people are
over-sensed, under-bodied neurotics. They lack animal vitality. I think
I can speak from experience, since I have mixed a good deal with working
people. In the mass they are happy, much happier, perhaps, than we are.
Perhaps because they don’t eat too much, and so think dyspeptically.”
That saying of Canterton’s, “People are much happier than you imagine”
haunted Eve’s consciousness, walked at her side, and would not suffer
itself to be forgotten. She had moments when she suspected that he had
spoken a great truth. He had told her once to read Walt Whitman, but of
what use was that great, barbaric, joyous person to her in her wilful
viewing of sociological problems? It was a statement that she could test
by her own observations, this assertion that the majority of people are
happy. The clerks and shopmen who lunched in the tea-shops talked hard,
laughed, and made a cheerful noise. If she went to the docks or Covent
Garden Market, or watched labourers at work in the streets, she seemed
to strike a stolid yet jocose cheerfulness that massed itself against
her rather pessimistic view of life. The evening crowds in the streets
were cheerful, and these, she supposed, were the people who slaved in
shops. The factory girls out for the dinner hour were merry souls. If
she went into one of the parks on Sunday, she could not exactly convince
herself that she was watching a miserable people released for one day
from the sordid and hopeless slavery of toil.
The mass of people did appear to be happy. And Eve was absurdly angry,
with some of the prophet’s anger, who would rather have seen a city
perish than that God should make him appear a fool. Her convictions
rallied themselves to meet the challenge of this apparent fact. She
contended that this happiness was a specious, surface happiness. One had
but to get below the surface, to penetrate behind the mere scenic
effects of civilisation to discover the real sorrows. What of the slums?
She had seen them with her own eyes. What of the hospitals, the asylums,
the prisons, the workhouses, the sweating dens, even the sordid little
suburbs! She was in a temper to pile Pelion on Ossa in her desire to
storm and overturn this serene Olympian assumption that mankind in the
mass was happy.
In walking along Southampton Row into Kingsway, she passed on most days
a cheerful, ruddy-faced young woman who sold copies of _Votes for
Women_. This young woman was prettily plain, but good to look at in a
clean and comely and sturdy way. Eve glanced at her each day with the
eyes of a friend. The figure became personal, familiar, prophetic. She
had marked down this young woman who sold papers as a Providence to whom
she might ultimately appeal.
It seemed to her a curious necessity that she should be driven to try
and prove that people were unhappy, and that most men acted basely in
their sexual relationships towards women. This last conviction did not
need much proving.
Being in a mood that demanded fanatical thoroughness, Eve played with
the ultimate baseness of man, and made herself a candle to the
night-flying moths. She repeated the experience twice—once in Regent
Street, and once in Leicester Square. Nothing but fanaticism could have
made such an experiment possible, and have enabled her to outface her
scorn and her disgust. Several men spoke to her, and she dallied with
each one for a few seconds before letting him feel her scorn.
She spent the last night of her stay in the Bloomsbury hotel sitting in
the lounge and listening to three raucous American women who were
talking over their travels. They had been to Algiers, Egypt, Italy, the
South of France, and of course to Paris. The dominant talker, who had
gorgeous yellow hair, not according to Nature, and whose hands were
always moving restlessly and showing off their rings, seemed to remember
and to identify the various places she had visited by some particular
sort of food that she had eaten! “Siena, Siena. Wasn’t that the place,
Mina, where we had ravioli?”
“Did you go to Ré’s at Monte Carlo? It’s an experience to have eaten at
Ré’s.” “I shan’t forget the Nile. The Arab boy made some bad coffee, and
I was sick in the stomach.” They went on to describe their various
hagglings with hotel-keepers, cabmen, and shop-people, and the
yellow-haired lady who wore “nippers” on a very thin-bridged,
sharp-pointed nose, had an exhilarating tale to tell of how she had
stood out against a Paris taxi-driver over a matter of ten cents. Eve
had always heard such lavish tales of American extravagance, that she
was surprised to discover in these women the worst sort of meanness, the
meanness that contrives to be generous on a few ostentatious occasions
by beating all the lesser people’s profits down to vanishing point. She
wondered whether these American women with their hard eyes, selfish
mouths, and short-fingered, ill-formed, grasping hands were typical of
this new hybrid race.
It amused her to contrast her own situation with theirs. When
to-morrow’s bill was paid, and her box taken to Charing Cross station,
she calculated that she would have about twelve pence left in her purse.
And she was going to test another aspect of life on those twelve
pennies. It would not be ravioli, or luncheon at Ré’s.
Eve packed up her box next morning, paid her bill, and drove off to
Charing Cross, where she left her box in the cloak-room. She had exactly
elevenpence left in her purse, and it was her most serious intention to
make these eleven pennies last her for the best part of two days. One
thing that she had lost, without noticing it, was her sense of humour.
Fanaticism cannot laugh. Had Simeon Stylites glimpsed but for a moment
the comic side of his existence, he would have come down off that pillar
like a cat off a burning roof.
The day turned out to be a very tiring one for her, and Eve found out
how abominably uncomfortable London can be when one has no room of one’s
own to go to, and no particular business to do. She just drifted about
till she was tired, and then the problem was to find something upon
which to sit. She spent the latter part of the morning in the gardens
below Charing Cross Station, and then it began to rain. Lunch cost her
threepence—half a scone and butter, and a glass of milk. She dawdled
over it, but rain was still falling when she came out again into the
street. A station waiting-room appeared to be her only refuge, for it
was a sixpenny day at the National Gallery, and as she sat for two hours
on a bench, wondering whether the weather was going to make the
experiment she contemplated a highly realistic and unpleasant test of
what a wet night was like when spent on one of the Embankment seats.
The weather cleared about four o’clock, and Eve went across to a
tea-shop, and spent another threepence on a cup of tea and a slice of
cake. She had made a point of making the most of her last breakfast at
the hotel, but she began to feel abominably hungry, with a hunger that
revolted against cake. After tea she walked to Hyde Park, sat there till
within half an hour of dusk, and then wandered back down Oxford Street,
growing hungrier and hungrier. It was a very provoking sign of health,
but if one part of her clamoured for food, her body, as a whole,
protested that it was tired. The sight of a restaurant made her loiter,
and she paused once or twice in front of some confectionery shop, and
looked at the cakes in the window. But sweet stuffs did not tempt her.
They are the mere playthings of people who are well fed. She found that
she had a most primitive desire for good roast meat, beef for
preference, swimming in brown gravy, and she accepted her appetite quite
solemnly as a phenomenon that threw an illuminating light upon the
problems of existence.
Exploring a shabbier neighbourhood she discovered a cheap cook-shop with
a steaming window and a good advertising smell. There was a bill of fare
stuck up in the window, and she calculated that she could spend another
three pennies. Sausages and mashed potatoes were to be had for that sum,
and in five minutes she was sitting at a wooden table covered with a
dirty cloth, and helping herself to mustard out of a cracked glass pot.
It was quite a carnal experience, and she came out refreshed and much
more cheerful, telling herself with naive seriousness that she was
splitting life up into its elements. Food appeared to be a very
important problem, and hunger a lust whose strength is unknown save to
the very few, yet she was so near to her real self that she was on the
edge of laughter. Then it occurred to her that she was not doing the
thing thoroughly, that she had lapsed, that she ought to have started
the night hungry.
There was more time to be wasted, and she strolled down Shaftesbury
Avenue and round Piccadilly Circus into Regent Street. The pavements
were fairly crowded, and the multitude of lights made her feel less
lonely. She loitered along, looking into shop windows, and she had
amused herself in this way for about ten minutes before she became aware
of another face that kept appearing near to hers. She saw it reflected
in four successive windows, the face of an old man, spruce yet senile,
the little moustache carefully trimmed, a faint red patch on either
cheek. The eyes were turned to one side, and seemed to be watching
something. She did not realise at first that that something was herself.
“How are you to-night, dear?”
Eve stared straight through the window for some seconds, and then turned
and faced him. He was like Death valeted to perfection, and turned out
with all his senility polished to the last finger nail. His lower
eyelids were baggy, and innumerable little veins showed in the skin that
looked tightly stretched over his nose and cheekbones. He smiled at her,
the fingers of one hand picking at the lapel of his coat.
“I am glad to see you looking so nice, dear. Supposing we have a little
dinner?”
“I beg your pardon. I think you must be rather short-sighted!”
She thought as she walked away, “Supposing I had been a different sort
of woman, and supposing I had been hungry!”
She made direct for the river after this experience, and, turning down
Charing Cross and under the railway bridge, saw the long sweep of the
darkness between the fringes of yellow lights. There were very few
people about, and a raw draught seemed to come up the river. She crossed
to the Embankment and walked along, glancing over the parapet at the
vaguely agitated and glimmering surface below. The huge shadow of the
bridge seemed to take the river at one leap. The lapping of the water
was cold, and suggestively restless.
Then she turned her attention to the seats. They seemed to be full,
packed from rail to rail with indistinct figures that were huddled close
together. All these figures were mute and motionless. Once she saw a
flutter of white where someone was picking broken food out of a piece of
newspaper. And once she heard a figure speaking in a monotonous
grumbling voice that kept the same level.
Was she too late even for such a refuge? She walked on and at last
discovered a seat where a gap showed between a man’s felt hat and a
woman’s bonnet. Eve paused rather dubiously, shrinking from thrusting
herself into that vacant space. She shrank from touching these sodden
greasy things that had drifted like refuse into some sluggish backwater.
Then a quiver of pity and of shame overcame her. She went and thrust
herself into the vacant place. The whole seat seemed to wriggle and
squirm. The man next to her heaved and woke up with a gulp. Eve
discovered at once that his breath was not ambrosial.
She felt a hand tugging at something. It belonged to the old woman next
to her.
“’Ere, you’re sitting on it!”
“I beg your pardon.”
She felt something flat withdrawn. It was a bloater wrapped up in a bit
of paper, but the woman did not explain. She tucked the thing away
behind her and relapsed. The whole seat resettled itself. No one said
anything. Eve heard nothing but the sound of breathing, and the noise
made by the passing of an occasional motor, cab, or train.
* * * * *