And while such turbid solicitudes as these were flowing in again from
the London world to which she had returned, and fouling the bright,
romantic clearness of Marjorie's life, Trafford, in his ampler, less
detailed way was also troubled about their coming re-entry into society.
He, too, had his old associations.
For example, he was by no means confident of the favourable judgments of
his mother upon Marjorie's circle of school and college friends, whom he
gathered from Marjorie's talk were destined to play a large part in this
new phase of his life. She had given him very ample particulars of some
of them; and he found them interesting rather than richly attractive
personalities. It is to be noted that while he thought always of
Marjorie as a beautiful, grown-up woman, and his mate and equal, he was
still disposed to regard her intimate friends as schoolgirls of an
advanced and aggressive type....
Then that large circle of distinguished acquaintances which Marjorie saw
so easily and amply utilized for the subjugation of Aunt Plessington
didn't present itself quite in that service to Trafford's private
thoughts. He hadn't that certitude of command over them, nor that
confidence in their unhesitating approval of all he said and did. Just
as Marjorie wished him to shine in the heavens over all her people, so,
in regard to his associates, he was extraordinarily anxious that they
should realize, and realize from the outset without qualification or
hesitation, how beautiful, brave and delightful she was. And you know he
had already begun to be aware of an evasive feeling in his mind that at
times she did not altogether do herself justice--he scarcely knew as yet
how or why....
She was very young....
One or two individuals stood out in his imagination, representatives and
symbols of the rest. Particularly there was that old giant, Sir Roderick
Dover, who had been, until recently, the Professor of Physics in the
great Oxford laboratories. Dover and Trafford had one of those warm
friendships which spring up at times between a rich-minded man whose
greatness is assured and a young man of brilliant promise. It was all
the more affectionate because Dover had been a friend of Trafford's
father. These two and a group of other careless-minded, able,
distinguished, and uninfluential men at the Winton Club affected the end
of the smoking-room near the conservatory in the hours after lunch, and
shared the joys of good talk and fine jesting about the big fireplace
there. Under Dover's broad influence they talked more ideas and less
gossip than is usual with English club men. Twaddle about appointments,
about reputations, topics from the morning's papers, London
architecture, and the commerce in "good stories" took refuge at the
other end in the window bays or by the further fireplace. Trafford only
began to realize on his return to London how large a share this
intermittent perennial conversation had contributed to the atmosphere of
his existence. Amidst the romantic circumstances of his flight with
Marjorie he had forgotten the part these men played in his life and
thoughts. Now he was enormously exercised in the search for a
reconciliation between these, he felt, incommensurable factors.
He was afraid of what might be Sir Roderick's unspoken judgment on
Marjorie and the house she had made--though what was there to be afraid
of? He was still more afraid--and this was even more remarkable--of the
clear little judgments--hard as loose, small diamonds in a bed--that he
thought Marjorie might pronounce on Sir Roderick. He had never disguised
from himself that Sir Roderick was fat--nobody who came within a hundred
yards of him could be under any illusion about that--and that he drank a
good deal, ate with a cosmic spaciousness, loved a cigar, and talked and
laughed with a freedom that sometimes drove delicate-minded new members
into the corners remotest from the historical fireplace. Trafford knew
himself quite definitely that there was a joy in Dover's laugh and
voice, a beauty in his face (that was somehow mixed up with his healthy
corpulence), and a breadth, a charity, a leonine courage in his mind
(that was somehow mixed up with his careless freedom of speech) that
made him an altogether satisfactory person.
But supposing Marjorie didn't see any of that!
Still, he was on the verge of bringing Sir Roderick home when a talk at
the club one day postponed that introduction of the two extremes of
Trafford's existence for quite a considerable time.
Those were the days of the first enthusiasms of the militant suffrage
movement, and the occasional smashing of a Downing Street window or an
assault upon a minister kept the question of woman's distinctive
intelligence and character persistently before the public. Godley
Buzard, the feminist novelist, had been the guest of some member to
lunch, and the occasion was too provocative for any one about Dover's
fireplace to avoid the topic. Buzard's presence, perhaps, drove Dover
into an extreme position on the other side; he forgot Trafford's
new-wedded condition, and handled this great argument, an argument which
has scarcely progressed since its beginning in the days of Plato and
Aristophanes, with the freedoms of an ancient Greek and the explicitness
of a modern scientific man.
He opened almost apropos of nothing. "Women," he said, "are
inferior--and you can't get away from it."
"You can deny it," said Buzard.
"In the face of the facts," said Sir Roderick. "To begin with, they're
several inches shorter, several pounds lighter; they've less physical
strength in footpounds."
"More endurance," said Buzard.
"Less sensitiveness merely. All those are demonstrable things--amenable
to figures and apparatus. Then they stand nervous tensions worse, the
breaking-point comes sooner. They have weaker inhibitions, and
inhibition is the test of a creature's position in the mental scale."
He maintained that in the face of Buzard's animated protest. Buzard
glanced at their moral qualities. "More moral!" cried Dover, "more
self-restraint! Not a bit of it! Their desires and passions are weaker
even than their controls; that's all. Weaken restraints and they show
their quality. A drunken woman is far worse than a drunken man. And as
for their biological significance----"
"They are the species," said Buzard, "and we are the accidents."
"They are the stolon and we are the individualized branches. They are
the stem and we are the fruits. Surely it's better to exist than just
transmit existence. And that's a woman's business, though we've fooled
and petted most of 'em into forgetting it...."
He proceeded to an attack on the intellectual quality of women. He
scoffed at the woman artist, at feminine research, at what he called the
joke of feminine philosophy. Buzard broke in with some sentences of
reply. He alleged the lack of feminine opportunity, inferior education.
"You don't or won't understand me," said Dover. "It isn't a matter of
education or opportunity, or simply that they're of inferior capacity;
it lies deeper than that. They don't _want_ to do these things. They're
different."
"Precisely," ejaculated Buzard, as if he claimed a score.
"They don't care for these things. They don't care for art or
philosophy, or literature or anything except the things that touch them
directly. That's their peculiar difference. Hunger they understand, and
comfort, and personal vanity and desire, furs and chocolate and
husbands, and the extreme importance conferred upon them by having
babies at infrequent intervals. But philosophy or beauty for its own
sake, or dreams! Lord! no! The Mahometans know they haven't souls, and
they say it. We know, and keep it up that they have. Haven't all we
scientific men had 'em in our laboratories working; don't we know the
papers they turn out? Every sane man of five and forty knows something
of the disillusionment of the feminine dream, but we who've had the
beautiful creatures under us, weighing rather badly, handling rather
weakly, invariably missing every fine detail and all the implications of
our researches, never flashing, never leaping, never being even
thoroughly bad,--we're specialists in the subject. At the present time
there are far more educated young women than educated young men
available for research work--and who wants them? Oh, the young
professors who've still got ideals perhaps. And in they come, and if
they're dull, they just voluminously do nothing, and if they're bright,
they either marry your demonstrator or get him into a mess. And the
work----? It's nothing to them. No woman ever painted for the love of
painting, or sang for the sounds she made, or philosophized for the sake
of wisdom as men do----"
Buzard intervened with instances. Dover would have none of them. He
displayed astonishing and distinctive knowledge. "Madame Curie,"
clamoured Buzard, "Madame Curie."
"There was Curie," said Dover. "No woman alone has done such things. I
don't say women aren't clever," he insisted. "They're too clever. Give
them a man's track or a man's intention marked and defined, they'll ape
him to the life----"
Buzard renewed his protests, talking at the same time as Dover, and was
understood to say that women had to care for something greater than art
or philosophy. They were custodians of life, the future of the race----
"And that's my crowning disappointment," cried Dover. "If there was one
thing in which you might think women would show a sense of some divine
purpose in life, it is in the matter of children--and they show about
as much care in that matter, oh!--as rabbits. Yes, rabbits! I stick to
it. Look at the things a nice girl will marry; look at the men's
children she'll consent to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly!
For the sake of the home and the clothes. Nasty little beasts they'll
breed without turning a hair. All about us we see girls and women
marrying ugly men, dull and stupid men, ill-tempered dyspeptic wrecks,
sickly young fools, human rats--_rats!_"
"No, no!" cried Trafford to Dover.
Buzard's voice clamoured that all would be different when women had the
vote.
"If ever we get a decent care for Eugenics, it will come from men," said
a white-faced little man on the sofa beside Trafford, in the
confidential tone of one who tells a secret.
"Doing it cheerfully!" insisted Dover.
Trafford in mid-protest was suddenly stricken into silence by a memory.
It was as if the past had thrown a stone at the back of his head and hit
it smartly. He nipped his sentence in the bud. He left the case for
women to Buzard....
He revived that memory again on his way home. It had been in his mind
overlaid by a multitude of newer, fresher things, but now he took it out
and looked at it. It was queer, it was really very queer, to think that
once upon a time, not so very long ago, Marjorie had been prepared to
marry Magnet. Of course she had hated it, but still----....
There is much to be discovered about life, even by a brilliant and
rising young Professor of Physics....
Presently Dover, fingering the little glass of yellow chartreuse he had
hitherto forgotten in the heat of controversy, took a more personal
turn.
"Don't we know," he said, and made the limpid amber vanish in his pause.
"Don't we know we've got to manage and control 'em--just as we've got to
keep 'em and stand the racket of their misbehaviour? Don't our instincts
tell us? Doesn't something tell us all that if we let a woman loose with
our honour and trust, some other man will get hold of her? We've tried
it long enough now, this theory that a woman's a partner and an equal;
we've tried it long enough to see some of the results, and does it work?
Does it? A woman's a prize, a possession, a responsibility, something to
take care of and be careful about.... You chaps, if you'll forgive me,
you advanced chaps, seem to want to have the women take care of you. You
seem always to want to force decisions on them, make them answerable for
things that you ought to decide and answer for.... If one could, if one
could! If!... But they're not helps--that's a dream--they're
distractions, gratifications, anxieties, dangers, undertakings...."
Buzard got in his one effective blow at this point. "That's why you've
never married, Sir Roderick?" he threw out.
The big man was checked for a moment. Trafford wondered what memory lit
that instant's pause. "I've had my science," said Dover.