(_She-Note Series._)
The two were seated in an untrammelled Bohemian sort of way on the
imperturbable expanse of the South Downs. Beneath them was a carpet of
sheep-sorrel, its orbicular perianth being slightly depressed by their
healthy weight. In the distance they noticed thankfully the
saucer-shaped combes of paludina limestone rising in pleasant strata to
the rearing scarp of the Weald. PERUGINO ALLAN was the gentleman's name.
He had only met PSEUDONYMIA BAMPTON the day before, but already from
mere community of literary instincts they were life-long friends. She
had reached the trysting-place first. All true modest women do this.
[Illustration]
"PSEUDONYMIA!" said PERUGINO, blushing easily to his finger-tips.
"PERUGINO!" said PSEUDONYMIA, blushing to hers. It was early, of course,
for Christian names, but then the Terewth had made them Free-and-Easy.
"PERUGINO!" said PSEUDONYMIA, bringing her eyes back from the infinite
to rest without affectation on her simple Greek chiton, "I have often
wanted to meet a real man who had written a book with a key to it on the
back of the cover. Now tell me frankly some more beautiful things about
our present loathsome system of chartered monogamy, so degrading to my
sex. Talk straight on, please, pages at a time. Never mind about
Probability. Terewth is stranger than Probability; and the Terewth, you
know, shall make you Free!"
PERUGINO sank back into the spongy turf, leaning his cheek against an
upright spike of summer furze of the genus _Ulex Europæus_. "Some
men," he began, "ignoble souls, 'look about' them before they marry.
Such are calculating egoists. Pure souls, of finer paste, are, so to
speak, _born married_. Others hesitate and delay. The difficulties of
teething, a paltry desire to be weaned before the wedding, reluctance
to being married in long clothes, the terrors of croup during the
honeymoon--these and other excuses, thinly veiling hidden depths of
depravity, are employed to defer the divine moment. I have known men to
reach the preposterously ripe age of one-and-twenty unwedded, protesting
that they dare not risk their prospects at the Bar. These men can never
mate like the birds, never be guide-posts to point humanity along the
path of Terewth."
"But," interrupted PSEUDONYMIA, rose-red to her quivering finger-tips
with shame at the bare mention of marriage; "but I thought you
disapproved of the debasing principle of wedlock."
"Do not interrupt," said PERUGINO, kindly; "I will come to that two or
three pages later on. To be prudent, I was going to say, is to be
vicious and cruel. Of course it is not given to all to be _born_
married. But this natal defect one can easily remedy. I knew a young
fellow who did. The indispensable complement crossed his path before it
was too late. He was still at his preparatory school; _he married the
matron_. True, there was disparity of age, but it was a step in the
right direction; though the head-master, a man of common conventional
ideas, gave the boy a severe rebuke.
"But to push on at once to contradictions. Marriage, I have said
elsewhere, is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of
the tents of iniquity. In _my_ gospel Love, like Terewth, should be
Free; ever moving on, moving on. Now, Italy is the home----"
"Ah!" cried PSEUDONYMIA, "Italy! That reminds me of sunburnt Siena. What
a wonderful Peruguinesque chapter that was in your book. Like a leaf
torn out of the live heart of BAEDEKER!"
"Italy," continued PERUGINO doggedly, "is the home of backgrounds. I
would like everyone to have a background--a past; the more pasts the
better. Is not that a beautiful thought? Ever moving on to something
different!"
"That has been the dream of my childhood," said PSEUDONYMIA, her white
Cordelia-like soul thrilled through and through with sacred convictions.
A ripe gorse-pod burst in the basking sunlight. ("I never remember
seeing sunlight bask before," she thought.) A bumble-bee said something
inaudible. "But why," she added, "did you never give this pure sentiment
to the world before? You who have written so many many books?"
"My child," replied the artist, "I was compelled to write down to the
public taste. One must consider one's prospects. This, you will say,
seems to clash with what I said before about calculating egoists. But
profession and practice are ever divorced under our depraved system of
civilisation. At last, having established myself, I rose superior to
sordid avarice, and wrote for once solely to satisfy my own taste and
conscience."
"A noble sacrifice!" said PSEUDONYMIA, suppressing her dimples for the
moment. "As the physically weaker vessel, I could only have done it
under an assumed name. But tell me of one difficulty which you have so
cleverly avoided in your book. This question of the family. Will not a
confusion arise in another generation when nobody quite knows who and
how many his or her half-brothers and half-sisters are?"
"PSEUDONYMIA!" said PERUGINO, and his voice broke in two places, "I am
pained. I had thought that you, so pure, so emancipate, would have had a
soul above blithering detail. Besides, do you not see that in this way
the whole world will eventually become one family? _We_ may not live to
see this Millennium, but future Fabians may. What we want is a
protomartyr in the cause. SHELLEY promised well, but he ultimately
reverted to legal wedlock. As for me, I have been deemed unworthy of the
crown. I am, alas! happily married. But you, you are single; why should
you not set to all your sister-slaves a high example of that martyrdom
of which the glory, as well as the inconvenience, has been denied to
me?"
"Ah, dear PERUGINO!" she cried, visibly affected for the third time to
her finger-tips, "must it ever be so? Profession, as you say, divorced
from practice? Must one more noble name be added to the list of those
that shock the world so fearlessly with their books and live such
despicably blameless lives? I myself, too, am misleading in print. You
judged me by my pseudonymous publications to be single and unscrupulous.
But you were wrong. I also am unequal to the weight of that crown. How
can I be your martyr in the cause--I who these many years have
worshipped the very dust on which my husband deigns to tread? Can you
and I ever be forgiven for thus sinning against the light?"
PERUGINO rose to go, indignant, disillusioned. "_Et tu_, PSEUDONYMIA?"
he bitterly cried. (She had been at Girton and could follow the
original.) "Then I give you up. You are, I grieve to think, _a woman who
won't do_." And he made a she-note of it.
* * * * *
"WITH WHAT PORPOISE?"
[A porpoise has been seen gambolling in the Thames at Putney.]
Such a sea on at the North Foreland! Glad to get out of it. Nice river
coming down from somewhere. Must explore it.
Near some town. No end of oysters about. Oysters say it's Whitstable.
Seem dreadfully depressed. Ask them if the late cold was too much for
them? No, it's not that, they say, but injurious stories have been
circulated about them by medical men. Been called "typhoidal." Nobody
patronises them, and they've "lost their season in town." What do they
mean?
Off Southend. Friendly sole advises me not to venture further. "Tempt
not the Barking Outfall," he says, and adds that the "water at London
will poison me, and I shall be made into boots." London! Always wanted
to see it. What's the good of being called "a kind of gregarious whale"
by the dictionaries if I avoid society?
Got past Barking safely! Who is it--BROWNING I think--wrote a poem about
"Sludge, the Medium." Must have written it near Barking. Arrived off
Wanstead Flats. See a respectable man on banks being chivied by a mob.
Told (by a sprat) that "it's Mr. HILLS, of the Thames Ironworks, who's
been helping the unemployed." Now the unemployed seem helping _him!_
Tower Bridge rather fine.
Westminster. Big building. Curious scent in air. Told it's the Houses of
Parliament, and scent is eucalyptus, "because of the influenza." Curious
word--wonder what it means.
Up at Putney. See University Boat-Race, if I can stay long enough. Feel
sleepy. Must be the amount of bad water I've drunk. Knock up against an
ice-floe. Two men in boat try to shoot me. _They_ seem unemployed. Do
they want to make me into soup for the poor? Not if I know it. Trundle
back seawards. Meet a sea-gull. Says somebody tried to hook him from
embankment. Says he "doesn't like London." Rather inclined to agree with
him.
Back at sea. Know now what influenza means--because _I've caught it!_
Awful pains in my hide! Must consult a leech.
* * * * *