Under a Blue Moon
It was early on another Saturday evening, a fortnight after that
disastrous one, and Miss Quincey was taking the air in Primrose Hill
Park. She was walking to keep herself warm, for the breeze was brisk and
cool. There was a little stir and flutter in the trees and a little stir
and flutter in her heart, for she had caught sight of Dr. Cautley in the
distance. He was coming round the corner of one of the intersecting
walks, coming at a frantic pace, with the tails of his frock-coat waving
in the wind.
He pulled himself up as he neared her and held out a friendly hand.
"That's right, Miss Quincey. I'm delighted to see you out. You really are
getting strong again, aren't you?"
"Yes, thank you--very well, very strong."
Was it her fancy, or did his manner imply that he wanted to sink that
humiliating episode of the tea-party and begin again where they had left
off? It might be so; his courtesy was so infinitely subtle. He had
actually turned and was walking her way now.
"And how is _Sordello?_" he asked, the tone of his inquiry suggesting
that there was something seriously the matter with _Sordello_.
"Getting on. Only fifty-six pages more."
"You _are_ advancing, Miss Quincey--gaining on him by leaps and bounds.
You're not overdoing it, I hope?"
"Oh no, I read a little in the evenings--I have to keep up to the
standard of the staff. Indeed," she added, turning with a sudden suicidal
panic, "I ought to be at home and working now."
"What? On a half-holiday? It _is_ a half-holiday?"
"For some people--not for me."
His eyes--she could not be mistaken--were taking her in as they had done
before.
"And why not for you? Do you know, you're looking horribly tired. Suppose
we sit down a bit."
Miss Quincey admitted that it would be very nice.
"Hadn't you better put your cape on--the wind's changing."
She obeyed him.
"That's hardly a thick enough wrap for this weather, is it?"
She assured him it was very warm, very comfortable.
"Do you know what I would like to do with you, Miss Quincey?"
"No."
"I should like to pack you off somewhere--anywhere--for another three
months' holiday."
"Another three months! What would my pupils do, and what would Miss
Cursiter say?"
It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be
indispensable to Miss Cursiter.
"Confound Miss Cursiter!"
Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded
her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County
Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment;
he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and
then--he let himself go.
At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling
furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and
women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let
them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to
take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared
himself against the universe.
"What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men
and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of
flightiness.
"Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal
if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman
on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work,
with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam."
Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there
was another side to it.
"Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many
people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."
Stirred by a faint _esprit de corps_ Miss Quincey asked him if he did not
believe in the open door for women?
He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces."
She threw in a word about the women's labour market--the enormous demand.
He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and
sold dear.
She sighed.
"But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?"
He groaned.
"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the damnable necessity. I
only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so
many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work
an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know,
you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the
same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the
average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically
fatuous. There must be one of two results--either the average imbeciles
are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or
it's the other way about."
"Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to
the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress."
"They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual
savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman
scrimmage--the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't
even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops
monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect
itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a
woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or
I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest--the one in
a thousand."
"Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite
shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of
the old beacons and landmarks.
He stared into the distance.
"Oh yes, I approve of them when they are really educated--not when
they are like that. You won't get the flower of womanhood out of a
forcing-house like St. Sidwell's; though I daresay it produces pumpkins
to perfection."
What did he say to Miss Vivian then? Miss Quincey could not think badly
of a system that could produce women like Miss Vivian.
A cloud came over his angry eyes as they stared into the distance.
"That's it. It hasn't produced them. They have produced it."
Miss Quincey smiled. Evidently consistency was not to be expected of this
young man. He was so young, and so irresponsible and passionate. She
admired him for it; and not only for that; she admired him--she could not
say exactly why, but she thought it was because he had such a beautiful,
bumpy, intellectual forehead. And as she sat beside him and shook to that
vibrating passion of his, she felt as if the blue moon had risen again
and was shining through the trees of the park; and she was happy,
absolutely, indubitably happy and safe; for she felt that he was her
friend and her protector and the defender of her cause. It was for her
that he raged and maddened and behaved himself altogether so
unreasonably.
Now as it happened, Cautley did champion certain theories which Miss
Cursiter, when she met them, denounced as physiologist's fads. But it was
not they, nor yet Miss Quincey, that accounted for his display of
feeling. He was angry because he wanted to come to a certain
understanding with the Classical Mistress; to come to it at once; and the
system kept him waiting. It was robbing him of Rhoda, and Rhoda of her
youth. Meanwhile Rhoda was superbly happy at St. Sidwell's, playing at
being Pallas Athene; as for checking her midway in her brilliant career,
that was not to be thought of for an instant.
The flower of womanhood--it was the flower of life. He had never seen a
woman so invincibly and superlatively alive. Cautley deified life; and in
his creed, which was simplicity itself, life and health were one; health
the sole source of strength, intelligence and beauty, of all divine and
perfect possibilities. At least that was how he began. But three years'
practice in London had somewhat strained the faith of the young devotee.
He soon found himself in the painful position of a priest who no longer
believes in his deity; overheard himself asking whether health was not an
unattainable ideal; then declaring that life itself was all a matter of
compromise; finally coming to the conclusion that the soul of things was
Neurosis.
Beyond that he refused to commit himself to any theory of the universe.
He even made himself unpleasant. A clerical patient would approach him
with conciliatory breadth, and say: "I envy you, Cautley; I envy your
marvellous experience. Your opportunities are greater than mine. And
sometimes, do you know, I think you see deeper into the work of the
Maker." And Cautley would shrug his shoulders and smile in the good man's
face, and say, "The Maker! I can only tell you I'm tired of mending the
work of the Maker." Yet the more he doubted the harder he worked; though
his world spun round and round, shrieking like a clock running down, and
he had persuaded himself that all he could do was to wind up the crazy
wheels for another year or so. Which all meant that Cautley was working a
little too hard and running down himself. He had begun to specialize in
gynecology and it increased his scepticism.
Then suddenly, one evening, when he least looked for it, least wanted it,
he saw his divinity incarnate. Rhoda had appealed to him as the supreme
expression of Nature's will to live. That was the instantaneous and
visible effect of her. Rhoda was the red flower on the tree of life.
At St. Sidwell's, that great forcing-house, they might grow some
vegetables to perfection; whether it was orchids or pumpkins he neither
knew nor cared; but he defied them to produce anything like that. He was
sorry for the vegetables, the orchids and the pumpkins; and he was sorry
for Miss Quincey, who was neither a pumpkin nor an orchid, but only a
harmless little withered leaf. Not a pleasant leaf, the sort that goes
dancing along, all crisp and curly, in the arms of the rollicking wind;
but the sort that the same wind kicks into a corner, to lie there till it
rots and comes in handy as leaf mould for the forcing-house. Rhoda's
friend was not like Rhoda; yet because the leaf may distantly suggest the
rose, he liked to sit and talk to her and think about the most beautiful
woman in the world. To any other man conversation with Miss Quincey would
have been impossible; for Miss Quincey in normal health was uninteresting
when she was not absurd. But to Cautley at all times she was simply
heart-rending.
For this young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had
after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and
hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This
very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow,
in the infinite entanglement of things, such women as Miss Quincey were
perpetually being sacrificed to such women as Rhoda Vivian. It struck him
that Nature had made up for any little extra outlay in one direction by
cruel pinching in another. It was part of her rigid economy. She was not
going to have any bills running up against her at the other end of the
universe. Nature had indulged in Rhoda Vivian and she was making Miss
Quincey pay.
He wondered if that notion had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were
trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power
(if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him,
of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world;
some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in
her. He was not sure that her attitude to Miss Quincey was not the most
beautiful thing about her. He had begun by thinking about the colour of
Rhoda's eyes. He could not for the life of him remember whether they were
blue or green, till something (Miss Quincey's eyes perhaps) reminded him
that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of
blue in them. That was what his mind was running on as he looked into the
distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his bumpy intellectual forehead
was bulging with great thoughts. And now Miss Quincey supplied a
convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath. He got up and with
his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury
with his coat-tail.
"The whole thing is one-sided and artificial and absurd. Bad enough for
men, but fatal for women. Any system that unfits them for their proper
functions--"
"And do we know--have we decided--yet--what they are?" Miss Quincey was
anxious to sustain her part in the dialogue with credit.
He stared, not at the distance but at her.
"Why, surely," he said more gently, "to be women first--to be wives and
mothers."
She drew her cape a little closer round her and turned from him with
half-shut eyes. She seemed at once to be protecting herself against
his theory and blinding her sight to her own perishing and thwarted
woman-hood.
"All Nature is against it," he said.
"Nature?" she repeated feebly.
"Yes, Nature; and she'll go her own way in spite of all the systems that
ever were. Don't you know---you are a teacher, so you ought to know--that
overstrain of the higher faculties is sometimes followed by astonishing
demonstrations on the part of Nature?"
Miss Quincey replied that no cases of the kind had come under _her_
notice.
"Well--your profession ought to go hand-in-hand with mine. If you only
saw the half of what we see--But you only see the process; we get the
results. By the way I must go and look at some of them."
His words echoed madly in a feverish little brain, "Ought to
go--hand-in-hand--hand-in-hand with mine."
"Nature can be very cruel," said she.
Something in her tone recalled him from his flight. He stood looking down
at her, thoughtful and pitiful. "And Nature can be very kind; kinder than
we are. You are a case in point. Nature is trying to make you well
against your will. A little more rest--a little more exercise--a little
more air--"
She smiled. Yes, a little more of all the things she wanted and had never
had. That was what her smile said in its soft and deprecating bitterness.
He held out his hand, and she too rose, shivering a little in her thin
dress.
She was the first to hurry away.
He looked after her small figure, noted her nervous gait and the agitated
movement of her hand as the streamers on her poor cape flapped and
fluttered, the sport of the unfeeling wind.