[Cover Illustration]
THE
TYPE-WRITER GIRL
BY
OLIVE PRATT RAYNER
LONDON
C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED
HENRIETTA STREET W.C.
1897
TO
THEODORE RAYNER
AND
OLIVER WENDELL PRATT,
A WIFE’S HOMAGE,
A SISTER’S LOVE.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. —INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE 9
II. —THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE 18
III. —ENVIRONMENT WINS 29
IV. —THE CHOICE OF A PATRON 41
V. —VIVE L’ANARCHIE! 47
VI. —THE INNER BROTHERHOOD 60
VII. —A MUTINOUS MUTINEER 68
VIII. —CALLED “OF ACCIDENTS” 83
IX. —I PLAY CARMEN 95
X. —SIC ME SERVAVIT APOLLO! 104
XI. —A SAIL ON THE HORIZON 114
XII. —A CAVALIER MAKES ADVANCES 131
XIII. —CONCERNING ROMEO 137
XIV. —“NOW BARABBAS WAS A PUBLISHER” 145
XV. —FRESH LIGHT ON ROMEO 155
XVI. —I TRY LITERATURE 165
XVII. —A DRAWN BATTLE 176
XVIII. —AN AUTUMN HOLIDAY 194
XIX. —“O ROMEO, ROMEO!” 203
XX. —“WHEREFORE ART THOU ROMEO?” 223
XXI. —ENVOY PLENIPOTENTIARY 242
XXII. —I CLING TO THE RIGGING 253
NEW 3s. 6d. BOOKS.
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=The Invisible Man.=
By H. G. WELLS.
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=Fortune’s Footballs.=
By G. B. BURGIN.
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=The Skipper’s Wooing.=
By W. W. JACOBS.
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=John of Strathbourne.=
By R. D. CHETWODE.
THE TYPE-WRITER GIRL.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE.
I was twenty-two, and without employment.
I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in
which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces
of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy
me. A swallow’s back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of
meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip
out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall
see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear
nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as
they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even here in London, where life is rarer,
how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange
barks—mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living
stream is so marvellous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do
they go?—innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each
real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars,
phantoms that flash athwart the orbit of my life one second, and then
vanish. But to themselves they are the centre of a world—of _the_
world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon.
I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one
after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at
least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown,
by the early trains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin
soot of the chimney-back—men with small black bags, bound for
mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they
may lend money, or buy shares, or promote Christian knowledge. I only
know I see them come in the morning and flit again at night, sometimes
the same figures, recognisably identical. They rush back, absorbed, to
catch the train to the Unknown, as they rushed up from it earlier. So,
day after day, the tide sets and ebbs; while I stand on the shore of the
vast sea of London like a child that watches. And Commissioner Lin
guards me.
I have always been grateful to Mr. Samuel Butler for his eccentric
theory that a woman wrote the Odyssey. I do not say that I agree with
him; if I did, I am not aware that any critic would attach the least
importance to my opinion. But it is a soothing theory for us latter-day
women. Without thinking it true, I love to believe it. The Odyssey, you
will grant, is the epic of the imagination. It is the epic of mystery.
In the Iliad, which is the epic of fact, everything is clear-cut,
distinct, commonplace. I do not conceive that a woman could have written
the Iliad. Its theme would fail to interest her. That hard handplay of
battle counts for nought to our sex. Clang of bronze sword on ringing
shield rouses no echo in our heart or brain. It is a masculine poem. How
practical it is, how cold, how everyday, how mannish! Considering its
august age, how little it gleams with the glamour of antiquity! Ulysses
in the Iliad is just a shifty politician, an adroit public speaker.
Achilles is just a petulant, ill-disciplined young warrior—I have met
him in London, fresh home from the Transvaal. The whole mighty saga is a
saga of men’s ideas, so sharp is it in its outlines, so historical, so
definite. But the Odyssey!
Yes, I read in it clearly the fine hand of a woman. It has the
vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft.
It thrills with mystery; and woman is the mystic. Look at its glorious
dimness. You descry its geography in veiled outline only, as one beholds
the Paps of Jura on a day of sea-fog through swaying sheets of white
cloud from a fisherman’s boat on the Bay of Oban. It is a Celtic
dreamland. From morning to night, in that enchanted poem, on and on we
sail, past uncertain isles or dubious blue headlands, begirt with
fantastic forms, and in perils of the sea more awesome than the real.
Architects have reconstructed Priam’s palace, I believe, from the
description in the Iliad. That is man’s way of describing. But who could
reconstruct, from the rapt words of the Odyssey, Circe’s island or the
gardens of Alcinous? Peering and prying Schliemann found in the
battle-epic a whole plan of the Troad; or, at least, read one into it:
fancy even imagining you could construct a chart of the Mediterranean to
show the homeward maze of the much-travelled wanderer from Ilion to
Ithaca! The bare idea would indicate a misconception of the Odyssey. For
those are the seas and islands that never were; they live but in the
ghost-geography of poets and women.
As arguments, indeed, the proofs adduced seem to me preposterous. It is
nonsense to say that in the Odyssey the chief _rôle_ is played by women.
Do women’s books deal exclusively, or even mainly, with their own sex?
Is not the Titan man, the strong, sardonic, woman-quelling hero, a
recognised commonplace of women’s fancy? I do not believe an Ithacan
lady wrote the Odyssey _because_ of the relative importance of Penelope
and Nausicaa. Surely even a man might have set Penelope at her web, or
Nausicaa at her tennis. In that I see nothing occult or esoterically
feminine. Men must be aware that every Circe has the power of turning
men into swine. They ought to know; they have seen it done daily. No,
those are not the reasons that weigh with me. It is the wonder, the
magic, the purple mystery, of the Odyssey that tells to my mind in
favour of its female authorship. And though I know Mr. Samuel Butler’s
theory is not true, I thank God I am woman enough none the less to
embrace it.
But what has all this to do with my story—the story I am setting out in
my own fashion to tell you? A great deal; and besides, unless you let me
tell it in my own wayward way, I can never get through with it. In that
respect also I hold myself true woman. And this is the connection. “If
only we could have lived in those days!” people say. I answer, “You
_are_ living in them.” It is not the days, not the places, not the
things that change, but we who see them otherwise. Consider, the
Mediterranean is the same sea to-day as when the Ithacan lady who wrote
the Odyssey looked out upon its blue zones to behold it peopled with
strange forms and wizard shadows. For that nameless Sappho, that
prehistoric Charlotte Brontë, that inchoate Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
the Ionian main swarmed alive with Gorgons and Harpies as Loch Fyne with
herrings. Sirens sang on every rock to lure the seaman; promontories
glowed red at set of sun with the forges of the Cyclops. You may steam
down the prosaic Adriatic to-day in an Austrian Lloyd steamer—a
fearsome Behemoth, bellowing, snorting, flame-breathing—and identify
those charmed shores of Hellenic fancy, as laid down, with soundings, in
the Admiralty surveys. But that is your blindness. Scylla and Charybdis
are there as of old: ’tis you who turn them into the Straits of Messina.
Polyphemus still haunts his seaward cave: ’tis you who transform him
into a custom-house officer. Adventures are to the adventurous. Go
through the world in search of Calypso, and you will surely find her. Be
modern, and you will find only Willesden Junction. That may suffice for
you. I live in “those days,” as all lovers of the mystical have always
lived in them.
And I will go forth into the world in search of adventures. They are
sure to come to me; for faith moves mountains. In every age, when the
Princess Cleodolind is sent out from the city as a prey for the dragon,
some youthful St. George, in celestial armour, rides by in the nick of
time, on his snow-white steed, and draws his trusty blade, and fights
for her, and rescues her from the loathly thing. Else what were the use
of faith and of poetry? In every age we fashion the story anew in our
passing manner, dressing it up in our own clothes, and fitting it to our
particular modes and morals. But ’tis the same to the end through all
disguises. The Greeks told it as the tale of Perseus and Andromeda; they
made their hero purely Greek, a triumphant young son of immortal Zeus,
who rescues a beautiful princess, with fair nude limbs like Parian
marble, from the devouring sea-monster. Mediæval Italy made the sign of
the cross, turned the son of Danaë into a Christian martyr, and clad the
beautiful nude maiden in clinging silk robes, as it would fain have clad
Melian Aphrodite herself when it converted her image into a crowned
Madonna. The Renaissance came, and Cellini unclothed her again, in his
revived paganism, to set her polished bronze limbs, where every eye
might see and stare, in the Piazza at Florence. Our modern novelists
dress her up afresh in the princess robe of the day (sage green or
crushed strawberry), and turn her loose on that slimy old dragon the
world, till Prince Charming comes by, as a baronet in a tennis suit, to
lay at her feet ten thousand a year and the title of My Lady. But ’tis
the old tale still, and who lists to tell it may trick it out once more
in his own heart’s fashion. For though there be nothing new under the
sun, the old wonder is there, as marvellous as ever, if you choose to
marvel at it. Each spring brings it back, a perpetual miracle.
So I set forth into the world, a Princess Cleodolind of the nineteenth
century, ready to face the dragons that, as I well know, abound in it,
and full of faith in the St. George who will come to rescue me. I mean
to sail away on my Odyssey, unabashed, touching at such shores as may
chance to beckon, yet hopeful of reaching at last the realms of
Alcinous.
From all which you may guess that I am a Girton girl.